Adèle de Toulouse-Lautrec in the salon at Malromé

Toulouse-Lautrec painted his mother here in 1886, in the drawing room of Malrome, the country house near Bordeaux she had bought a few years before. He was only 22 and still years away from the Montmartre dance halls and lurid posters that would make his name. The Countess Adele sits quietly with a cup, her eyes turned away from us, the furniture around her described with real tenderness. She was the steady centre of his life, and she sat for him again and again. When he died young, worn out at 36, it was she who gathered up the huge body of work nobody else wanted and gave much of it to his home town of Albi, which is why so much of him hangs there today, this quiet portrait of his mother among it.