Two horses led in hand

Lautrec was 17 when he painted this, and horses were the first thing he was taught to paint. His father, Count Alphonse, lived for hunting and the stables, and the painter he handed his son to was Rene Princeteau, a deaf specialist in horses and hunting scenes who let the boy work beside him in his Paris studio. The picture is tiny, about 24 centimetres across, the sort of thing done quickly in a yard while the animals are being walked. Later in 1882 Lautrec went to Paris in earnest, into the studio of Leon Bonnat and then of Fernand Cormon, and the subjects began shifting from animals to people in rooms. Almost everything still in his studio when he died in 1901 was offered to Albi by his mother, and the town put it in the old bishops' palace, where it opened in 1922.