Titans of History

Toulouse-Lautrec soon became famous for his lithographs. Bold and clear, their elegant style anticipates art nouveau. They showed that art did not have to consist solely of oil on canvas, and as posters they turned advertising into an art form. The vast audience this gave him transformed his career. “My poster is pasted today on the walls of Paris,” he declared proudly of his first lithograph in 1891. His lithographs showed the great singing, dancing and circus stars of the Parisian night, especially the Moulin Rouge: Aristide Bruant dans son cabaret or Moulin Rouge—La Goulue and Jane Avril sortant du Moulin Rouge are now pasted on walls across the world. His paintings are remarkable for their humanity: his debonair boulevardier Louis Pascal shows that he could render men masterfully too, while his study for The Medical Inspection catches the pathos of whores queuing up in the surgery. Some of his most beautiful paintings show these women relaxing together or alone, such as Abandon, the Two Friends or the touching Red Haired Woman Washing. Both the stars and the ordinary girls were his friends and lovers.

Like the rest of his family, Toulouse-Lautrec was enthusiastically sporty, but at the age of thirteen he broke his left thigh bone and a year later his right. Despite a long convalescence and numerous painful treatments, his legs never grew again. With a man’s torso on dwarfish legs, he never exceeded 5ft (1.52m) in height. The cause was a bone disease, probably of genetic origin.

There is a clear irony in the contrast between the energy and physicality of Lautrec’s paintings and his own atrophied state. He was never reconciled to his condition. His compositions often hide the legs of his figures. Surrounded by unusually tall friends, “he often refers to short men,” commented one acquaintance, “as if to say ‘I’m not as short as all that!’” But the “tiny blacksmith with a pince-nez” was under no illusions about himself: “I will always be a thoroughbred hitched to a rubbish cart” was just one of a litany of self-deprecating remarks.

Even in the raffish, boozy world of Montmartre, Lautrec’s alcohol consumption was legendary. He helped to popularize the cocktail. The earthquake—four parts absinthe, two parts red wine and a splash of cognac—was a particular favorite. Syphilis accelerated his physical and mental decline, and when his beloved mother left Paris suddenly in 1899, it precipitated a total mental collapse. He was sent to a sanatorium, where he produced one of his greatest series of drawings, At the Circus. But after a brief spell he returned to Paris.

Toulouse-Lautrec degenerated into a haze of alcohol, the earthquake giving way to an esoteric diet of “eggs, which Monsieur eats raw mixed with rum.” Removed to one of his family’s châteaux, he was reduced to dragging himself along by his arms as his useless legs failed to work. Almost paralyzed and nearly totally deaf, Toulouse-Lautrec was just thirty-six when he died.

“He would have liked the elegant, active life of all healthy sports-loving persons,” wrote his father after his death. His son achieved in art all the vitality missing from his life. The man who did more than any other to create the image of fin de siècle Paris imbued his works with an astounding energy.

RASPUTIN

1869–1916

When the bell tolls three times, it will announce that I have been killed. If I am killed by common men, you and your children will rule Russia for centuries to come; if I am killed by one of your stock, you and your family will be killed by the Russian people! Pray Tsar of Russia. Pray.

Rasputin

Grigory Yefimovich Novykh was known as Rasputin, the debauched one and the Mad Monk.

An illiterate itinerant peasant, Rasputin was able to wield considerable influence over Russia’s autocratic rulers. He rose to prominence as an enigmatic mystic, finding a ready audience for his peculiar brand of religious devotion at a time when many Russian aristocrats were fixated by mysticism and the occult. He appears to have embraced a distorted version of the Khlysty creed, reworking its emphasis on flagellation to advocate sexual exhaustion as the surest path to God.