Henri is 19 years old, he already leads a Parisian lifestyle, studying in the workshops of great masters: Léon Bonnat and Fernand Cormon. He sets up his summer workshop in Malromé and stays until the harvest he describes in his drawings.
Countess Adèle of Toulouse-Lautrec acquired the Malromé estate in 1883, attracted by its peace and the idyllic joys of nature and the countryside. The purchase symbolized a new lease of life and freedom for the Countess.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec is limited in his movements, upset by his loves. All the physical and moral constraints required by his illness, lead him to transcend them, by a total freedom in his pictorial practice.
The vision that Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec has on society at this end of century, is deeply human. His drawings, his paintings show the reality of situations hard to live with. He reaches the reality of the human being behind the social mask.
Without material and moral constraints, he knew how to release the pictorial language from the straitjacket of the codes of academic painting and blew a wind of freedom that he left us as heritage. In the effervescence of this turn of the century, he is at the forefront of his generation, and contributes to the renewal of pictorial art.
