Three years ago Gerstle Mack's Paul Cezanne was published and accepted almost at once as a definitive biography. Painstaking and fully documented, it presented Cezanne as a great intuitive inventor in the art of painting; and its sympathetic account of the artist's crotchety life cleared the air of much second-rate chatter. Biographer Mack's new subject is Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa,* who died of drink and exhaustion in 1901, aged 36, the greatest French master of line between Daumier and Picasso.
Most important single fact about Toulouse-Lautrec is that both his legs were broken...