Caballo rojo

This was painted around 1873 by a boy of eight. Henri's father, Count Alphonse de Toulouse-Lautrec, kept hawks and horses and organised his life around hunting, and the child grew up in houses where riding was the main adult occupation. He drew horses in his schoolbooks constantly, and a watercolour like this one is that habit on a bigger sheet. What the family expected of him ended a few years later, when he broke one thigh bone at 13 and the other at 14, the breaks healed badly and his legs stopped growing. His mother and his friend the dealer Maurice Joyant eventually handed the family's hoard of his work to the town of Albi, which is why sheets like this one survive. The museum opened there in 1922.