HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC | Le Joueur de flûte

Inter Art Gallery, Basel
Private Collection, Switzerland (acquired from the above in 1980; sale: Sotheby’s, London, 6th February 2001, lot 202)
Private Collection, United Kingdom (purchased at the above sale; sale: Sotheby's, London, 6th February 2008, lot 456)
Private Collection, Cyprus (purchased at the above sale; sale: Sotheby's, London, 6th February 2014, lot 568)
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

M.G. Dortu, Toulouse-Lautrec et son œuvre, New York, 1971, vol. II, no. P237, illustrated p. 103
Bruno Foucart & Gabriele Mandel Sugana, Tout l'œuvre peint de Toulouse-Lautrec, Milan, 1977, no. 240, illustrated p. 102

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Born into an aristocratic French family in 1864, Toulouse-Lautrec moved to Paris from his home of Albi at the age of 18 and quickly joined the ateliers of Léon Bonnat and Fernand Cormon, both staunchly academic painters. The present work is a rare painting executed early in the artist's career, combining Lautrec’s traditional education, evoking the classical subject matter of Arcadian Aulos player's, with elements of the avant-garde style he would soon adopt. While naturalism was the chosen form of representation in the Third Republic at that time, the loose brushstrokes and dramatic crop of Le joueur de flûte hint at the more dynamic methods Lautrec would embrace as a Post-Impressionist. Richard Thomson writes, 'Lautrec’s aesthetic had been rooted in the dominant naturalism. His teachers had taught him to study the model unflinchingly. The work of more radical artists, notably Edgar Degas, instructed him in subtle pictorial devices to give greater actuality to the fiction of the image: off-center compositions, the active use of empty space, the figure cut off by the edge of the frame as if it were on the periphery of our field of vision…[Lautrec] and others sought to extend the frontiers of naturalism into more expressive territory, to make it sharper and more dangerous' (Richard Thomson, 'Toulouse-Lautrec & Montmartre: Depicting Decadence in Fin-de-Siècle Paris,' in Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre (exhibition catalogue), The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago & National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Princeton, 2005, p. 4). Le Joueur de flûte therefore captures a moment of transition between the academic aesthetic of the artist’s studies and his appreciation for avant-garde masters like Degas.