Cavalier en costume du XVIIIe siècle

Lautrec was 15 when he painted this, and he was painting horses because everyone around him did. His family bred and rode them, and his first real teacher was Rene Princeteau, a deaf animal painter and a friend of his father, who let the boy work beside him in his Paris studio. The rider here is in the dress of the previous century rather than the clothes of 1880, a costume subject rather than anything seen. Almost nothing from these early years ever left the family. When Lautrec died in 1901 his mother kept the entire contents of his studio, and in 1922 she, his relative Gabriel Tapie de Celeyran and his dealer Maurice Joyant gave the lot to the town of Albi. That is why the schoolboy horse paintings and the Moulin Rouge posters ended up in the same building.