Rennbahn

Lautrec was 16 when he painted this, and 1881 was the year his life got decided. He failed the baccalaureat in Paris that summer, passed it in Toulouse in November, and then talked his mother into letting him train as a painter rather than do anything else with the family name.

His ally in that argument was Rene Princeteau, a deaf painter of horses and hunting scenes, a friend of his father's who had been giving him lessons since he was 14. Horses were what Princeteau taught and what the boy already knew from a childhood spent around the family's stables, so a racecourse was the obvious subject for a beginner in that household.

The picture never left the family's orbit. It is in Albi, the town where he was born, in the museum built around the studio estate his mother handed to the town after his death in 1901.