Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was born in 1864 into one of the oldest aristocratic families in France, the kind expected to ride to hounds on its own estates. His body had other plans. As a teenager he broke both thigh bones a year apart, around ages 13 and 14, and the legs stopped growing while his torso filled out into that of a grown man. Modern doctors think he had a rare inherited bone condition, now sometimes called Toulouse-Lautrec syndrome.

Cut off from the life his name promised, he moved to Montmartre, the hilltop district of Paris packed with cabarets, dance halls and brothels, and made it his subject. When the Moulin Rouge cabaret opened in 1889 he was hired to design its posters, and he treated the cheap medium of the printed advertisement as serious art, flattening figures into bold shapes and hand-lettered names. He painted the dancer La Goulue and the singer Yvette Guilbert as people he actually knew, from inside their world.

He drank heavily, absinthe above all, and his health gave out fast. He died in 1901 at his mother's country house, 36 years old. His mother spent the years afterward gathering up his scattered work, and much of it now fills a museum in Albi, the town in southern France where he had been born.