セレイランの若きルーティ

Before the dance halls and cabarets of Montmartre that made his name, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a teenager painting on his family's estates in the south of France. This is Céleyran, the Toulouse-Lautrec property near Narbonne, and the sitter is a young farm labourer the family called Routy, whom the painter used as a model several times. He was about 18 when he made it, still learning, and he catches the boy off in his own thoughts, a little shy, whittling a piece of wood on a low wall. There is none of the sharp Paris wit here yet. Lautrec drew Routy in half a dozen studies before settling on this quiet head, and the date has since drifted between 1882 and 1883 in the records.