The singing lesson

In 1882 the painter of Montmartre and the Moulin Rouge did not exist yet. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was 17, working in the Paris studio of Rene Princeteau, a family friend who painted horses, and that March he was taken to meet the academic master Leon Bonnat. This singing lesson belongs to those apprentice months, years before the dancers, the cabarets and the printed posters that would make his name. As a boy he had broken both thigh bones, and the legs never grew properly, which helped steer him from the outdoor sporting life of his aristocratic family toward the studio. What you see here is a young man still learning the trade in a quiet domestic key, attentive to the everyday scene in front of him rather than the nightlife he had not yet found.