二頭の馬と馬丁

In 1880 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was 15 and had spent much of the previous two years on crutches. He broke one thigh bone in 1878 and the other the following summer, and neither healed properly, which quietly closed off the riding and hunting his family in the Tarn took for granted. What he did instead was paint what he could still watch from the ground. His father's friend René Princeteau, a deaf painter who specialised in horses, hunts and cavalry, was giving him his first real lessons, and the family stable was the obvious subject. Two horses, a groom holding them, worked fast in oil on a wood panel. His mother, Countess Adèle, gave this and more than a thousand other works to the town of Albi in 1922, which is how the place he was born in ended up with the largest single collection of him anywhere.