Little-known facets of the painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec revealed by the Revue du Tarn

It has been thirty years since the Revue du Tarn, founded in 1875, devoted one of its issues to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. “It became necessary to offer something new,” confessed its editor-in-chief for the occasion. At the auditorium of the Toulouse-Lautrec museum, where he presented issue 276 of his magazine on Wednesday, Guillaume Gras was surrounded in particular by the president of the Society of Friends of the Toulouse-Lautrec museum, as well as the director and curator of heritage of the museum.

Certainly, more than 200 biographies and exhibition catalogs have already been devoted to the Albigensian painter, but the Revue du Tarn and its ten volunteer authors manage to highlight, with originality, “HTL”, an artist particularly open to ideas of his time.

Witness of his time

His fragile health led him to take a close interest in the world of medicine. “He had a real fascination with this field if we judge by the number of paintings of operations and sketches that he left,” underlines Guillaume Gras. A chapter is therefore devoted to “this patient curious about medicine”. Another, just as fascinating, evokes the courtroom artist, to whom we owe around fifty sketches made in the courtrooms of the Paris courthouse in 1896.

A witness to his time, the native also influenced the greatest, including Picasso. The magazine echoes this while also devoting an entire and touching chapter to Countess Adèle, the artist's mother. They wrote to each other a lot, and this private correspondence says a lot about the anguish of a mother who will devote her life to this exceptional son in every way. Just as moving: the portrait of the painter, based on a photograph from 1885, unveiled that day in the museum auditorium.

Contemporary portrait

A drawing made in black chalk and charcoal by Eric Fonteneau adorns the front cover of the Tarn quarterly. The visual artist donated it to the Society of Friends of the Toulouse-Lautrec Museum, which participated in this project. “Since its creation, our association has donated or supported the acquisition of more than a hundred works and documents that have permanently entered the museum’s collections,” its president likes to point out. Brigitte Bénézech also gave, during a session, to Fanny Girard, the museum curator, two collection works referring to the Albigensian painter.