Toulouse-Lautrec’s moving school notebooks: a unique exhibition reveals the painter’s childhood drawings

Being an artist cannot be taught. We have confirmation of this by looking at Toulouse-Lautrec’s childhood drawings. It’s hard to believe that these drawings were made by an 8-10 year old child. For several days, the Toulouse-Lautrec museum has been exhibiting the Albigensian painter’s childhood drawings, as part of the 160th anniversary of his birth. They are included in the permanent exhibition. You have to take advantage of them quickly because they will only stay for a few months. Until January 12 to be precise. This is linked to the fragility of the paper, which can only be exposed briefly otherwise it will be damaged.

Because here, we are not talking about master paintings. These are childhood drawings that are on display. Quick sketches made in school notebooks. “We’ve all done it by scribbling in the margins,” comments the curator, Fanny Girard. But despite all the admiration we have for our children, it is clear that we are not all equal when it comes to doodling.

On these sketches, we already find what will make Lautrec’s line. This definition of faces, this sense of line, of observation, of movement. We remain silent in front of the small portrait of a woman in the first room or that of this man smoking his pipe. Facial expressions… You have to observe carefully because the drawings are small and there are a lot of them on certain pages. But the discovery is a great moment of enchantment. In the second room, we admire very beautiful attempts to illustrate tales and already very realistic drawings of horses.

A signature essay, tinged with melancholy

In the third, the schoolchildren’s drawings are also evocative of what Lautrec would become. In Greek, he draws hoplites, wise men in religious education. On other subjects, given the number of drawings, we can imagine that he must have been really bored. Still in this room, we can see a signature essay, magnificent, but oh so tinged with melancholy. In all these sketches, we see the great painter in the making whose works we know. This is what is fascinating about this exhibition.

All these notebooks and other drawings were given to the museum as part of the 1924 donation. “We have a very beautiful collection of drawings. We are working on it a lot at the moment. There, we had targeted the 9-10 year period. We could have included all the horses but we wanted to show the diversity of his drawings. Even when he was little, he captured the profiles,” explains Fanny Girard.

In the legacy, we also find diaries from the end of his life, with sketches. The museum is considering how to better showcase this part of the collection confined to reserves by, for example, creating a graphic art cabinet.

In the meantime, the curator wishes to show these drawings to the Albigensians during one-off events. By always releasing new products, she wants to break habits. Make the Albigensians and Tarnais people want to come back and visit the museum. “To reclaim it.”