La Plume de Mon Oncle

In the years since his death in 1901, the dwarfish figure of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec has been surrounded by a fabric of legends--that he was a lecherous troll, happy only when he lived in the midst of a bevy of rowdy streetwalkers; that he was a black sheep and a profligate driven from his home by a wealthy and outraged noble family. The truth of the matter may be quite the opposite, as a show called "Toulouse-Lautrec and His Family" at the Museum of Rennes, France, sets out to prove.

Nearly all the works on view came from widely scattered members of the artist's family, and almost half of them have never before been seen by the public. Though Lautrec's Parisian period--the era of the raffish La Goulue. Valentin the Boneless, and high-kicking Jane Avril--was largely responsible for his fame, it is apparent that his childhood on the family estate in southern France shaped his destiny. The show in Rennes is a warmhearted family album of portraits and sketches of the people and things that surrounded the crippled painter after he fell off a chair at the age of 13 and was doomed to live the rest of his days as a short-legged, gloriously talented freak. "L'oncle Henri," says Lautrec's niece. Countess Attems, "is as alive in my memory as though I had seen him yesterday. Afraid of him? Was Snow White frightened by her dwarfs?"

The family is an ancient and illustrious one: Lautrec's armor-clad ancestors went on the Crusades, his rich grandfather, father and uncles, all did their bit toward the greater grandeur of France. They were artists, too, as proved by their sketches of hunting scenes and country life, which are included in the exhibition. Says Count Robert de Toulouse-Lautrec, the painter's cousin and closest survivor: "Perhaps if Henri had not been deformed, he would have become a diplomat or an officer. But he certainly would have painted too."

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