Provenance
Estate of the artist, from 1901 [a letter from Cesar de Hauke dated March 17, 1949 in curatorial file; estate stamp]. Hector Brame (1866-1936), Paris [Dortu 1971]. Sold by Cesar de Hauke, New York, to the Art Institute, 1949.
Accession Number
64560
Medium
Sketchbook of drawings containing 47 leaves including both end sheets by the artist. The media are pencil, black grease crayon and occasionally pen and ink and watercolor. Drawings on both sides of each leaf except 7
Dimensions
15.9 × 25.7 cm (6 5/16 × 10 1/8 in.)
Classification
sketchbook
Credit Line
Robert Alexander Waller Memorial Fund
Background & Context
Background Story
This 1880 sketchbook is one of the most revealing documents of Toulouse-Lautrec's early development, a collection of forty-seven leaves filled with drawings in pencil, black grease crayon, pen and ink, and occasional watercolor that shows the teenage artist experimenting with subjects and techniques that would define his mature career. The sketchbook belongs to the period when Toulouse-Lautrec was studying with René Princeteau in Paris, absorbing the academic fundamentals that he would later subvert with such spectacular success. The subjects range from horses and riders—his first love, inherited from his aristocratic family's equestrian tradition—to studies of faces, figures, and architectural details that demonstrate an observational hunger far exceeding the demands of his formal training. The medium of grease crayon is particularly significant: this soft, greasy material allowed rapid, tonal drawing that anticipated the bold blacks of his later posters, while the pencil studies show the more conventional academic discipline that underpinned his unconventional style. The sketchbook also reveals the artist's physical limitations as a source of artistic strength: unable to ride or hunt because of his bone disorder, he drew obsessively, transforming deprivation into visual abundance. Art historians have compared these early pages to the sketchbooks of Degas and van Gogh, noting that Toulouse-Lautrec's drawings are more detached, more analytical than the emotionally charged studies of his contemporaries. The sketchbook format itself—portable, intimate, cumulative—reflects the artist's working method throughout his career: he filled thousands of such pages, mining them later for the motifs that would appear in his paintings and prints.
Cultural Impact
This 1880 sketchbook revealed aristocratic equestrian origins transforming into observational hunger, using grease crayon and pencil to document how physical limitation became artistic abundance.
Why It Matters
It matters because a fourteen-year-old filled forty-seven pages with everything he couldn't do—proving that drawing could be compensation for a body that refused to grow.
