Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who died recently, insane, leaves a great
work behind him. He had a kind of cruel genius. Descended from one of
the greatest families of France, badly treated by nature who made him a
kind of ailing dwarf, he seemed to take a bitter pleasure in the study
of modern vice. He painted scenes at café-concerts and the rooms of
wantons with intense truth. Nobody has revealed better than he the
lowness and suffering of the creatures "of pleasure," as they have been
dubbed by the heartrending irony of life. Lautrec has shown the
artificiality of the painted faces; the vulgarity of the types of the
prostitutes of low origin; the infamous gestures, the disorder, the
slovenliness of the dwellings of these women; all the shady side of
their existence. It has been said that he loved ugliness. As a matter of
fact, he did not exaggerate, he raised a powerful accusation against
everything he saw. But his terrible clairvoyance passed for caricature.
This sad psychologist was a great painter; he pleased himself with
dressing in rose-coloured costumes the coarsest and most vulgar
creatures he painted, such as one can find at the cabarets and concerts,
and he enjoyed the contrast of fresh tones with the faces marked by vice
and poverty; Lautrec's two great influences have been the Japanese and
Degas. Of the former he retained the love for decorative arabesques and
the unconventional grouping; of the other the learned draughtsmanship,
expressive in its broad simplification, and one might say that the pupil
has often been worthy of the masters. One can only regret that Lautrec
should have confined his vision and his high faculties to the study of a
small and very Parisian world; but, seeing his works, one cannot deny
the science, the spirit and the grand bearing of his art. He has also
signed some fine posters, notably a _Bruant_ which is a masterpiece of
its kind.

Degas's deep influence can be found again in J.L. Forain, who has made