A personal friend of the singers and dancers, Lautrec was a central figure of the society he depicted and the intimacy of a painting such as Les Deux Amies (1894) is characteristic. Like Degas he worked in a wide range of media often freely mixed: his reputation as a graphic artist was established with his earliest posters and lithographs (1891-2). His prolific output shrank with his deteriorating health and his last painting, the Examination Board (1901), an uncomfortable attempt to reorientate his art, betrays his spiritual and physical exhaustion. His work inspired Rouault, Seurat, Lautrec and others and his brief career was an important manifestation of the fin de siecle intensity and exoticism (he admired Wilde enormously) which swept Europe and which can be seen for example in the early work of Picasso.


An excerpt from Toulouse-Lautrec by Gerhard Gruitrooy
For about fifteen years, Lautrec produced works in his own characteristic style. His enormous creative output was cut short by mental and physical illnesses which were worsened by alcoholism and syphilis. During an attack of delirium tremens at the house of the Natansons in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, in the summer of 1897, he saw huge spiders in his room and fired at them with a revolver. After suffering hallucinations while walking in the streets of Paris, Lautrec's family had the artist cominitted to a mental hospital. The conservative press leapt on Lautrec's dementia and launched personal attacks on the artist and his work. Aware of his physical and mental decline, Lautrec wrote to his father begging to be released: "Papa, this is your chance to do the decent thing. I am confined, and all confined things die."

A three-month-stay in the clinic, brought Lautrec temporary relief from his unstable and troubled condition. He recovered some of his health, and was able to work and travel again. He even enjoyed a brief affair with Louise Margouin (Louise Blouet), a milliner whose features and red hair Lautrec captured in one of his last paintings (The Milliner). From October, 1900 to April of 1901, he lived in Bordeaux where he had a fleeting, and frantically productive period inspired by two productions at the local opera. Despite the surveillance of his chaperon, Paul Viand and the efforts of his friends, Lautrec began to drink again and his health deteriorated.

In February, Lautrec suffered a stroke that temporily paralyzed him. His alarming bouts of amnesia became more frequent. Realizing that his health was now deteriorating, Lautrec heeded Joyant's suggestion to make a thorough inventory of his Paris studio to prepare for a major retrospective. The effort exhausted Lautrec. He returned to Malrome, and died there on September 9, 1901, in his mother's arms. Lautrec was thirty-seven.