Article
Newsletter: Winter /Spring 2006
During his short career, the Post-Impressionist artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) became a consummate and highly influential master of lithography, a popular print medium that encouraged freedom of expression and highlighted swift gestures of draftsmanship. The museum's collection of prints and drawings includes an outstanding group of forty lithographs by Lautrec, whose name is virtually synonymous with fin-de-siecle Paris-- in particular the gas-lit nightlife of bohemian Montmartre that he captured in his bold and innovative color posters. In addition to these large, commercially produced advertisements, Lautrec designed book illustrations, theater programs, and limited edition portfolios, which added up to a cumulative output of over 350 lithographs between 1891 and 1901.
Adding both range and depth to the museum's rich holdings is his powerful print Le Jockey which was... bequeathed by Jane C. Koven in memory of her grandson Jan A. Stransky, Class of 1986. In this symphony of lean yet delicate lines and mostly muted colors, Lautrec depicts two jockeys in red and black hats, hunched and silhouetted against the wind and threatening gray sky, as they urge their lunging thoroughbreds flat out around the curve of a green race track. The windmill in the upper right corner identifies the track as Longchamp, in the Bois de Boulogne.
One of Lautrec's last color lithographs, The Jockey is the first in a series of racing prints, entitled Courses, that was commissioned by the publisher Pierrefort toward the end of the artist's three-month stay in the spring of 1899 at a private psychiatric clinic in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly, where he was being treated for alcoholism. Although Lautrec completed four lithographs on this theme (the others entitled The Paddock , The Trainer and His Jockey, and The Jockey Going to the Post), Pierrefort published only this one, printed by Lautrec's favorite printer, H. Stern, in two limited editions, the first in black and white (an edition of about seventy) and the second in color (an edition of 112).
This unfinished project signifies Lautrec's renewed interest in depicting horses, which he had frequently sketched as a child at his family's estates in south western France, and subsequently painted under the guidance of his father's friend Rene Princeteau (1839-1917), the fashionable painter of horses, racing, and hunt ing scenes. Although vestiges of Princeteau's mannerisms are visible in the schematic treatment of the horses in The Jockey, the primary sources of influence for this drama tically cropped composition, with its large flat color areas, are the paintings and sketches of racehorses and jockeys by Edgar Degas, the Japanese woodblock prints that both artists admired, and Edward Muybridge's photographs of horses in motion (published in 1878-81)-in particular those showing the point when all four feet leave the ground during the flying gallop. It is this fleeting moment that Lautrec is intent on capturing, and he exaggerates the scale of the horse's haunches, as if seen from an unusual close-up perspective not of the spectator at the racetrack rail but of the jockey following close behind. With this brilliant device, Lautrec, whose love of riding was severely impaired by his physical disabilities, places himself, the invisible jockey, at the heart of the action.
Adding both range and depth to the museum's rich holdings is his powerful print Le Jockey which was... bequeathed by Jane C. Koven in memory of her grandson Jan A. Stransky, Class of 1986. In this symphony of lean yet delicate lines and mostly muted colors, Lautrec depicts two jockeys in red and black hats, hunched and silhouetted against the wind and threatening gray sky, as they urge their lunging thoroughbreds flat out around the curve of a green race track. The windmill in the upper right corner identifies the track as Longchamp, in the Bois de Boulogne.
One of Lautrec's last color lithographs, The Jockey is the first in a series of racing prints, entitled Courses, that was commissioned by the publisher Pierrefort toward the end of the artist's three-month stay in the spring of 1899 at a private psychiatric clinic in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly, where he was being treated for alcoholism. Although Lautrec completed four lithographs on this theme (the others entitled The Paddock , The Trainer and His Jockey, and The Jockey Going to the Post), Pierrefort published only this one, printed by Lautrec's favorite printer, H. Stern, in two limited editions, the first in black and white (an edition of about seventy) and the second in color (an edition of 112).
This unfinished project signifies Lautrec's renewed interest in depicting horses, which he had frequently sketched as a child at his family's estates in south western France, and subsequently painted under the guidance of his father's friend Rene Princeteau (1839-1917), the fashionable painter of horses, racing, and hunt ing scenes. Although vestiges of Princeteau's mannerisms are visible in the schematic treatment of the horses in The Jockey, the primary sources of influence for this drama tically cropped composition, with its large flat color areas, are the paintings and sketches of racehorses and jockeys by Edgar Degas, the Japanese woodblock prints that both artists admired, and Edward Muybridge's photographs of horses in motion (published in 1878-81)-in particular those showing the point when all four feet leave the ground during the flying gallop. It is this fleeting moment that Lautrec is intent on capturing, and he exaggerates the scale of the horse's haunches, as if seen from an unusual close-up perspective not of the spectator at the racetrack rail but of the jockey following close behind. With this brilliant device, Lautrec, whose love of riding was severely impaired by his physical disabilities, places himself, the invisible jockey, at the heart of the action.
