Toulouse-Lautrec is commonly known as "the painter of the Paris night", the tragically crippled artist who lost himself in the louche world of sexy night-club dancers, coquettish whores, and merry drunks. But David Sweetman has taken a closer look at Lautrec's work to find a more complex side to the man who has, in the century since his death, been understood narrowly as a purveyor of frivolity, the celebrant of bacchanalian bar-room scenes and brothel orgies.
This book reveals an artist in tune with the radical social and political forces that transformed his age, who moved in the secret world of anarchist revolutionaries, who stood by Oscar Wilde when most had forsaken him, and whose work shows a deep pre-occupation with human - and especially female - suffering.
This is an entirely new way of looking not only at Lautrec, but also at other members of a group of artists whose work defined the avant-garde spirit of the fin-de-siecle: Oscar Wilde, the art and social critic Felix Feneon, Vincent van Gogh, the protest singers Aristide Bruant and Yvette Guilbert and the revolutionary playwright Alfred Jarry.
