Artilleryman saddling his horse

In the summer of 1878 the French army held manoeuvres near the Château du Bosc, the Toulouse-Lautrec family's house in the Aveyron hills, and for a while cavalrymen and gunners were part of the landscape. A year later Henri, then 15, painted this artilleryman saddling a grey horse. At the time he was taking lessons from René Princeteau, a family friend who specialised in painting horses, and the soldiers of those manoeuvres turn up in several of the boy's early canvases. Here the man stands with his back to us, head down against the horse's side, while a second rider moves off in the haze behind. The picture came to the museum in Albi in 1922, the year the museum opened, as a gift from the Countess de Toulouse-Lautrec, and in its inventory it is number one.