Despite his physical handicap, Henry Toulouse Lautrec — fascinated by life in the caf簿聶翻s, cabarets, dance halls, and bordellos around Montmartre — became one of the great portrayers of the
human figure. Possessed of the astonishing ability to understand the conditions of the socially ostracized milieu, he was able to look behind the facade of a crumbling bourgeois civilization.