Château du Bosc, the terrace

This is one of Toulouse-Lautrec's earliest paintings, made in 1880 when he was about 16, years before Paris and the Montmartre dance halls that made his name. The terrace belongs to the Château du Bosc, his family's country house in the Aveyron, where he spent childhood summers among a large aristocratic clan. He had been a frail boy, and long spells of recovery at the family estates were filled with drawing and painting. So the subject here is simply what a teenager had in front of him, the sunlit terrace of home. The canvas now hangs in the museum devoted to him in nearby Albi, the town where he was born.