Drawings

A few lines can set a horse in motion; hundreds of coloured strokes can hold a face still. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec used drawing for both. His surviving sheets range from childhood observations to working studies, portraits and remembered circus performances. They let us follow different kinds of attention: the effort to understand a body, the search for a composition and the decision to make a likeness complete in itself. ^[1]

Drawing also gave Lautrec ways to rethink an image. A figure could be traced, transferred, isolated and placed beside another figure. A painted scene could become a new drawing intended for reproduction. Looking at these intermediate objects changes the impression of effortless invention often attached to his art: apparent immediacy could survive a considerable amount of revision. ^[2]

A sheet can have more than one purpose

The first useful question is what the drawing was doing. Was it recording something seen, practising a difficult pose, testing a figure's position or preparing an image for another medium? A sketch need not be a preliminary study for a known painting. Equally, an elaborate sheet might have a practical purpose: Lautrec's large Yvette Guilbert was developed for an advertisement, although it remained an unprinted project. Materials, scale and documentary history help distinguish these uses. ^{[2] [5]}

The distinction matters because a reproduction flattens unlike objects into similar rectangles. A small pencil study and a nearly two-metre charcoal project may occupy the same space on a screen. An oil-and-charcoal portrait might look more like a painting than a drawing, while a lithograph preserves the appearance of a freely handled crayon. Reading the medium description restores some of the physical differences that the image alone cannot explain. Cleveland's Monsieur Boileau at the Café, catalogued in its drawings collection, is a particularly instructive example. ^[4]

For a first look, follow the distribution of effort. Where does the line become dark or repeated? Where does the paper remain almost empty? Does colour fill a shape or break into separate marks? These questions do not establish the order in which a work was made, but they make its choices visible. In the Van Gogh pastel, for example, the head, jacket and café furnishings all contain coloured lines, yet the profile remains the focus. In the Yvette project, dark gloves make the arms exceptionally forceful against the sparsely described dress. ^{[3] [5]}

Childhood observation: horses, sailors and a rowing boat

Drawing was already part of Lautrec's family life before the fractures of his adolescence. Colta Ives records his grandmother's early enthusiasm for his sketching and the instruction he received from his uncle Charles. Horses and hunting dogs were familiar subjects, but the childhood sketchbooks also responded to new surroundings. They establish a practice that preceded both formal Paris training and the entertainment subjects of his mature career. The fuller family and medical chronology belongs to his biography; the sheets themselves show a child looking outward. ^[1]

The Album de Marine, dated 1879–80, records a visit with his mother to the Mediterranean coast near Nice. Ives connects its maritime subjects with the arrival of an American frigate. The reproduced folios include a sailor and a rowing scene in watercolour and black chalk. These are modestly sized pages, about 15 × 23.5 centimetres, whose subjects extend beyond the family's equestrian world. ^[1]

In the rowing scene, the boat forms a long, shallow curve across the lower part of the sheet. Small dark figures recur along its length, their hats and bent arms creating a rhythm. Oars interrupt the blue water with diagonals, and a flag rises at the stern. Most of the page is pale sky. The eye can register boat, crew and motion without a densely worked harbour setting. The balance of repeated figures and open space makes a small observed action easy to follow. ^[1]

That distinction keeps the early work interesting on its own terms. The album joins observation and pleasure in a subject; it need not be treated as a prophecy of the mature artist. Its combination of a drawn structure and watercolour also introduces a recurring practical question: how much information must be supplied for a viewer to recognise an action? In the rowing boat, repeated bodies and a few projecting oars do much of that work. ^[1]

Academic drawing and the trained figure

Lautrec entered Léon Bonnat's studio and then Fernand Cormon's in 1882. Albi's current chronology gives that sequence, placing formal training several years before his first major poster. These studios offered disciplined study of the figure, and his later brevity of line should be understood alongside that training. A selective contour depends on decisions about proportion and the relationship of one part of the body to another. ^[8]

The academic setting also involved shared exercises. Franka Blok's Van Gogh Museum study notes that drawings by Lautrec and Van Gogh show them working from the same plaster casts. Such evidence makes their studio contact concrete. It also cautions against imagining their later experiments as an instantaneous abandonment of drawing lessons: practice after a model and experimentation among friends occupied overlapping parts of their Paris lives. ^[3]

A figure study answers a different question from a finished likeness. The artist may concentrate on the angle of the torso or the distribution of weight without supplying a complete setting. When a sheet leaves limbs or surroundings unresolved, that concentration may be more revealing than an expectation that every surface ought to be finished. The transfer sequence involving an artilleryman and a woman shows Lautrec taking a further step: the drawn figure becomes material that can be moved and reconsidered. ^[2]

Moving a figure: the artilleryman and woman

Riva Castleman discusses a group of compositions of about 1886 in which Lautrec developed an encounter between an artilleryman and a seated woman. He began with a sketch, traced it and transferred portions, making changes as he proceeded. He also worked with the woman alone before developing an unfinished composition on canvas. The sequence makes drawing a means of preserving useful information while altering a relationship. ^[2]

Castleman's illustrated comparison lets us see what repetition changes. In one sheet, the man's outlined body and the woman's profile are relatively open. Elsewhere the woman becomes a much denser, darker presence. Their placement can be reconsidered without inventing every feature again. Looking between the reproductions, the important action is the adjustment of the composition, rather than the manufacture of multiple identical pictures. ^[2]

Tracing and transfer therefore require precise description. They do not, by themselves, turn these sheets into lithographs. A transferred form might serve the preparation of another drawing or a painting. In this case the destination included canvas, and Castleman reads the process as a way of retaining the first sketch's directness while searching for a more satisfactory arrangement. The finished-looking economy of Lautrec's art was compatible with such patient reworking. ^[2]

Drawing for the press involved another translation. Castleman describes Lautrec organising versions of painted compositions in blue pencil, then identifying in black the elements to be reproduced. This separates the drawing's working information from the marks intended to reach the reader. It also shows why the printed image cannot always be treated as a neutral photograph of a painting: Lautrec could actively redraw the subject for its new conditions of circulation. His prints carry that story into published impressions. ^[2]

A finished pastel: Vincent van Gogh

The Portrait of Vincent van Gogh demonstrates how drawing could carry a substantial, independent likeness. Blok's 2024 catalogue entry identifies prepared paper stretched over cardboard and notes that the pastel strokes remain unblended throughout. The surface is built from lines rather than rubbed into an even coating. Although dated to 1887, the portrait's precise café setting and the circumstances of its acquisition by the Van Gogh brothers remain uncertain. ^[3]

Look first at the head's edge. The forehead, nose and beard cut a clear profile against the darker horizontal band behind them. Within that boundary, small pale strokes turn the forehead and cheek. On the jacket, longer brown and blue marks change direction with the shoulder and arm. The surrounding wall and furniture remain visibly busy, but their patterns do not dissolve the sitter into the room. The distinction between face and background is achieved through contrasts among marks rather than a contrast between an elaborately finished person and an empty setting. ^[3]

The tabletop introduces a different movement. Its pale diagonal carries the eye beneath the forearms towards the glass at the right. Above, the bar and mirror establish firmer horizontals and verticals. The head sits at the meeting of these systems, occupying relatively little of a richly articulated surface but holding its attention. Calling the work a drawing does not imply incompleteness: its coloured marks sustain the likeness, room and composition together. This is a useful comparison with the exploratory transfers, where the relationship between figures was still being tested. ^{[3] [2]}

When paint belongs in a drawings collection

Cleveland's Monsieur Boileau at the Café, dated 1893, combines oil and tempera with charcoal on millboard. At 80.3 × 65 centimetres, it is substantial enough to challenge any association of drawing exclusively with small notebook sketches. The museum records its 1925 purchase as the first acquisition of a Lautrec drawing by a museum in the United States. That acquisition gives the mixed-media portrait a place in the American museum history of French drawing. ^[4]

The portrait's materials remain active in its appearance. Short lines descend through the coat and accumulate around the sitter's hands. A pale tabletop cuts diagonally across the foreground, separating us from the man and carrying a glass, carafe and other objects. Behind him, hats and shoulders crowd the room. The drawn line gives definition to an interior whose colours and overlapping forms might otherwise become difficult to disentangle. Cleveland relates the saturated tones to gas lighting and describes thinned oil absorbing into the support. ^[4]

The museum's category is consequently useful when read alongside the complete material description. “Drawing” can encompass an object whose effect depends on paint, charcoal and the absorbent board together. It would be misleading to discard the oil and tempera when naming the medium, or to conclude that everything in a drawings department must be a dry-medium work on paper. The adjacent history of Lautrec's paintings becomes clearer when these material overlaps remain visible. ^[4]

Yvette Guilbert: a drawing intended for the street

The Albi Yvette Guilbert is an unusually large project: charcoal heightened with gouache on paper, 186 × 93 centimetres, dated 1894. Its narrow upright format gives the singer's head, long neck and black-gloved arms an imposing field. The museum identifies it as a study for an advertisement that Guilbert refused. It is therefore an original drawing made towards a poster, rather than an impression of a published poster. ^[5]

The gloves dominate the body. One arm descends and opens out near the hip; the other bends into a projecting hand. Between them, light green strokes suggest the dress without making it as solid as the black shapes at either side. Above, the upturned face carries a small red accent at the mouth. Empty paper extends beneath the figure. In this reproduction, emphasis depends on the contrast between concentrated dark marks and the lightly occupied surrounding field. ^[5]

Albi's 2025 account places the commission within Guilbert's preparation for an Ambassadeurs season and explains her objection to the unflattering likeness. It also records the continuation of their collaboration in the lithographic albums of 1894 and 1898. Her refusal was a decision about the image through which she would address her audience. The drawing's expressive success for a later viewer does not cancel the performer's own judgement about its usefulness as her advertisement. ^[8]

The distinction among project, poster and album clarifies what this sheet accomplished. The same famous gloves recur across Lautrec's representations of Guilbert, but a recurring identifying feature does not make the works interchangeable. This sheet records a particular proposed solution, at a particular scale, that did not proceed to publication in that form. The Yvette Guilbert article follows the commission and collaboration more fully. ^{[8] [5]}

Circus drawing before the clinic: Behind the Scenes, 1888

The small pencil Au cirque: dans les coulisses, or At the Circus: Behind the Scenes, belongs to 1888. Sotheby's 2018 record gives 22.5 × 17.4 centimetres and cites Dortu D.3.056. It connects the drawing with Lautrec's circus compositions of the later 1880s and a related grisaille painting. These particulars separate it from the circus drawings associated with his clinic stay eleven years later. ^[6]

The horse faces towards us between a woman at the left and a clown at the right. A raised arm crosses towards the animal while the clown's other hand opens outward. Parallel strokes run through costumes and sweep across the floor; lightly indicated architectural lines gather behind the horse. The figures remain distinct without being enclosed in uniformly heavy outlines. Their varying density draws the eye repeatedly back into the small group. ^[6]

The subject is a pause beside the performance rather than a panoramic spectacle. Sotheby's relates the grouping to the larger painting while leaving the precise moment before or after an appearance uncertain. That is a useful limit: the gestures make an encounter readable, but they cannot tell us its dialogue or the participants' thoughts. A shared circus setting is also insufficient evidence for assigning this sheet to the later memory series. Date, materials and catalogue identity have to travel with the image. ^[6]

Remembering the circus in 1899

During his stay at a clinic in Neuilly in the spring of 1899, Lautrec returned to circus subjects from memory, seeking to demonstrate his capacity for work. Getty's account links At the Circus: Entering the Ring to that undertaking. Ives records the doctors' statement of improvement on 17 May. Such documentary circumstances explain why drawing mattered to him at that moment; they do not make an individual line or pose a medical test. ^{[7] [1]}

Getty's Entering the Ring is an original of 1899, recorded as black and coloured pencils on paper, 31 × 20 centimetres. A performer seen from behind follows a horse towards the arena. Her blue skirt spreads across the narrow sheet while the horse and the arena barrier pull attention upwards. Long dark shadows extend from her slippers into the foreground. The relatively open ground makes the movement towards the ring feel spatially prolonged. ^[7]

Seen beside the 1888 backstage drawing, the change is striking. The earlier sheet gathers a horse and people into an encounter that faces towards us. The Getty drawing turns its principal bodies away, placing the viewer behind their movement. These are two different arrangements of attention within a subject Lautrec had known for years. Their relationship is more informative than the suggestion that the circus entered his art only during illness. ^{[6] [7]}

The original sheets also vary materially. Chicago's At the Circus: Work in the Ring, 1899, is catalogued as charcoal, pastel and black chalk, with stumping, touches of coloured pencil and incising on off-white wove paper. Its Trained Pony and Baboon, also 1899, is pastel and graphite on cream wove paper. These records show why “coloured pencil circus drawings” is an approximate collective description rather than a complete technical account of every work. Even within one period and subject, the individual object needs its own material identification. ^{[9] [10]}

An original drawing and its later printed life

The circus designs acquired another life through reproduction. The Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga explains that some were published in Le Figaro Illustré in April 1902 and that the posthumous Au cirque albums used a photomechanical process. It distinguishes a first group of 22 plates in 1905 from a second group of 17 in 1931. Those publication dates concern reproductions of the designs, rather than the making of Lautrec's original 1899 sheets. ^[11]

This distinction can be checked even when two reproductions look almost identical. The Málaga exhibition identifies its Entering the Ring as an album plate measuring 27.8 × 17.5 centimetres; Getty identifies its 31 × 20-centimetre work as a drawing. They share an image but have different physical histories. An album plate can preserve access to the composition while changing the kind of object through which we encounter it. ^{[11] [7]}

Later exhibitions can likewise reveal drawing's range by putting unlike paper objects together. SOMPO's 2024 Firos Collection exhibition presented drawings alongside posters, illustrations, letters and photographs. That breadth offers a productive way to explore Lautrec: a private observation, a commercial project and a reproduced image each answer different questions. Identifying the object opens a closer comparison of what its particular marks accomplish. ^[12]

Auscultation

Two figures meet through an act of close attention. The smaller figure at the left bends towards the taller person's torso, while the taller figure lowers the head to watch. The title, L’Auscultation, directs us to a medical act of listening. The drawing's interest lies in how clearly that encounter emerges from a few overlapping curves. Shoulders, bowed heads and the space between the bodies establish the activity before we look for details of clothing or furniture.

Sotheby's catalogued this pencil drawing in 2021 as circa 1893, measuring 33.2 × 21.9 centimetres, with a monogram at the lower right. It cites Dortu D.3.467. Those particulars identify a specific sheet; the title alone does not identify the people or establish a particular hospital or consultation. The lightly indicated furnishing at the right supplies a suggestion of an interior without turning the sketch into a full account of its setting. ^[13]

Notice how the bent figure's rounded back answers the taller figure's leaning upper body. Their differing heights make the action readable, and the hands concentrate attention near the centre. In a more fully worked image, shadows or a detailed room might direct our attention there. Here, the meeting of contours does that work. The page records the bodily arrangement of an examination while leaving its personal circumstances open.

Bust of a Man

A long coat and sharply projecting face dominate the image reproduced here. The head is small beside the elongated body, while the nose and beard make an angular interruption near the top. At the right, a separate profile repeats the interest in projecting facial features at a different scale. The sheet demonstrates how an economical outline can move between a standing figure and a concentrated head study without requiring a common background.

The familiar title Bust of a Man refers to the front of this double-sided sheet. Our illustration shows the reverse, catalogued as Charge d’homme, or a caricature of a man. Sotheby's 2020 record dates the pencil drawing to 1881 and gives 26.7 × 16.8 centimetres. It places the inscription Monsieur BONNAT on the recto, the other side. The catalogue references are Dortu D.1.972 for the recto and D.1.973 for the verso. The distinction prevents the inscription from being treated as a label visibly attached to the caricature. ^[14]

Look at the contrast between the coat's long vertical strokes and the short changes of direction around the face. One establishes length and posture; the other gives the figure its comic emphasis. Reproduction can easily detach this image from the sheet's opposite side. Keeping both titles in view restores the physical object's complexity without forcing both drawings into a single portrait identification.

Horseman and Amazon

Two mounted riders occupy the lower half of an unusually open upright page. Their horses overlap closely, with the nearer animal's hindquarters forming a prominent rounded shape at the right. The riders rise above that cluster as smaller vertical accents. Near the lower left edge, a separate human study seems to belong to another scale altogether. This distribution makes the sheet useful for thinking about a sketchbook page as a place for several observations rather than a fully unified scene.

Sotheby's offered Cavalier et amazone in June 2021 as pencil on paper, 16.5 × 11 centimetres, stamped with the artist's monogram at the lower right. Its record cites Dortu S.D.61 and confirmation by the Comité Toulouse-Lautrec. It supplies no execution date. The absence matters because Lautrec drew riders repeatedly: a date attached to another mounted pair cannot establish the chronology of this sheet. ^[15]

The title uses amazone in its equestrian sense of a woman rider. Beyond that description, the lines do not tell us who the riders are or whether the separate figure was observed at the same moment. What they do show is a contrast of attention. The paired horses receive enough repeated strokes to make their bodies and legs legible, whereas the small marginal figure remains comparatively slight. The large unworked upper area lets those differences remain visible.

Horserider in Top Hat

The top hat gives this small mounted figure an immediate vertical accent. Below it, the rider's upper body sits above a horse whose legs extend in different directions. The line is intermittent rather than uniformly dark. Repeated passages around the chest and legs suggest the effort of describing a complicated moving body; lighter contours elsewhere keep the form open. A faint detached head at the right makes the page more than a single equestrian vignette.

Bonhams catalogued the sheet in November 2021 as Cavalier en haut de forme on the recto, with Trois têtes d’homme on the verso. It dates the pencil drawing to circa 1879–81 and records dimensions of 14.1 × 22.8 centimetres, citing Dortu D.I.263 and D.I.264. These are the particulars of the sheet shown here, rather than of another similarly titled top-hatted rider. ^[16]

The open ground leaves us to infer movement through the animal itself. There is no arena rail or landscape to establish its path. The rider's upright hat and torso therefore become especially useful points of comparison with the horse's diagonals. The scene also leaves the rider unnamed. A top hat can establish an aspect of dress; it cannot by itself identify Lautrec's father or any other sitter. The value of the drawing lies in the relation of posture, gait and scattered observation that the sheet actually preserves.

Man Reading

A man leans towards an open book, bringing his head close to the dense horizontal marks along its lower edge. One hand supports the head, while dark hatching gathers behind the face and under the forearm. The drawing's strongest passages enclose the reader's attention: face, hand and book form a compact arrangement within a broader, more lightly described table space. The image can communicate absorption without explaining what the man is reading.

Sotheby's 2019 record dates Homme lisant to 1881 and describes a pencil sheet measuring 17 × 26.8 centimetres. It cites Dortu D.2.126 and records the monogram at the lower left of the recto. The reverse bears a different subject, Chien au parapluie, a dog with an umbrella. That pairing brings close observation and an imaginative animal motif onto opposite sides of the same object. ^[17]

The contrast does not require us to decide which side came first. It shows why a drawing sheet need not have a single purpose throughout its life. In the reader, the shaded background allows pale areas of forehead and hand to stand out, making light itself part of the description. Around the table, the marks become less insistent. Looking from the densely worked face to those lighter edges, we can follow changes in emphasis that a general title such as Man Reading only begins to describe.

Monsieur G.T. de C.

Blue strokes define a left-facing profile on a largely unworked sheet. The glasses, nose and projecting beard establish the face through short changes of direction. Behind them, curved lines follow the back of the head and meet the high collar. The shoulder is indicated more sparingly, so the figure seems to emerge from the paper most fully at the head. Colour functions here as the drawing's line, rather than as a separate filling applied inside an outline.

Sotheby's June 2015 record calls the work Monsieur G.T. De C and describes coloured crayon on paper, 30.9 × 20.9 centimetres. It cites Dortu D.4.224 and an appearance in the Matthiesen Gallery's 1951 Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition. The record gives no execution date and does not expand the initials. Its ownership history begins with Alexandre Natanson and the 1929 sale of his collection, but that history does not settle the sitter's name. ^[18]

The portrait is revealing even with that limit. The neck and back of the head carry parallel strokes that add density without filling the whole form. The glasses appear through only a small amount of line, yet strongly affect the face's character. Compare this economy with the darker hatching of Man Reading: both isolate a head, but they organise surrounding space very differently. Here, the untouched ground remains the dominant setting for the profile.

Presumed Portrait of Oscar Wilde

A substantial figure in a top hat is seen from behind, with the coat spreading across most of the narrow page. The shoulders form a broad slope below the small dark head, and the right arm bends into the body's outer contour. Below the coat, a few strokes suggest the legs. The drawing achieves much of its presence through this uneven distribution: the clothed back is expansive, while the extremities remain compressed and abbreviated.

The sitter's identification requires the qualification in the title. Sotheby's offered the sheet in July 2021 as Portrait présumé d’Oscar Wilde, a presumed portrait, measuring 14.6 × 7.6 centimetres. The record calls its medium black chalk and notes that Dortu S.D.71 describes it as pencil. It supplies no execution date. It is therefore distinct from Lautrec's better-known dated images of Wilde; their biographical circumstances cannot simply be assigned to this drawing. ^[19]

The rear view also explains why the uncertainty should remain visible. We have dress, bodily outline and a glimpse of the side of the head, with few facial details to compare. Those features make a memorable figure without independently proving a name. Looking at the work as a study of a coat, a stance and a turned body allows the drawing to retain its force while preserving the catalogue's careful distinction between a suggested identification and a securely named portrait.

The Sentimental Walk

Two figures walk away from us on an upright sheet. The left figure's hat and broad coat make the more emphatic shape; the companion and parasol are more delicately indicated at the right. Their proximity encourages us to read the group as an encounter, but neither figure turns towards the viewer to explain it. The movement depends on backs, inclining bodies and a few lines around the feet rather than on an extensively described destination.

Sotheby's dated La promenade sentimentale to circa 1895 in its March 2021 sale. The pencil drawing has visible dimensions of 31.5 × 20 centimetres and a monogram stamp at the lower left. The record cites Dortu D.4.016 and an earlier appearance at Tajan in 2009. Those details establish the object without identifying the walkers, their relationship or the occasion. ^[20]

The adjective in the title may invite a story, but the particular pleasure of the drawing is its incomplete information. The more firmly outlined coat seems close, while the lighter companion partly merges with the surrounding paper. Slight marks at the right imply space beyond the pair without closing it off. We follow the walkers through differences in pressure and emphasis. Their shared direction is visible; a private conversation, romance or commission remains outside what the image and the consulted record can establish.

Two Standing Women

The nearer woman turns slightly across the page, her head angled above an elaborately described dress. Behind her, a second standing figure appears at a smaller scale. The drawing does not provide enough setting to make this a secure account of two people occupying one continuous room. Instead, the page invites us to compare two figure studies: differences of size, posture and the rhythm of clothing become more important than a shared narrative.

Christie's catalogued the double-sided sheet in 2021 as Femme debout on the recto and Deux femmes debout on the verso. Our image shows the latter. The pencil drawing is dated circa 1881 and measures 27 × 17.2 centimetres. The record cites Dortu D.2.285 and D.2.286. Its distinction between front and back corrects the impression that the two women are the sheet's only subject. ^[21]

Follow the long curved strokes around the nearer skirt. They do more than close a silhouette: repeated and crossing lines suggest folds, layers and the way the fabric gathers around the body. The head and arms receive a different, more concentrated handling. On the smaller figure, fewer marks establish a comparable upright pose. Together the studies show how Lautrec could vary scale and detail on a single page, testing how much line a dressed figure needs to remain intelligible.