04/02/2025 General, Books & Autographs
NEW YORK, NY -- Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (whose full title was Comte Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa) was born at the Château du Bosc in the south of France, into a hugely wealthy French family. He suffered two severe falls during his early teens while riding, in both cases breaking a femur. He was probably predisposed to such injury by a genetic disorder, but whether from the falls or the underlying condition, his legs ceased to grow during childhood, leaving him once grown with an adult torso on the legs of a child, and a diminutive stature of 4 feet, 8 inches. Despite everything, horses remained a passion for him throughout his life and were the subject of some of his earliest canvases. The painter René Princeteau, a brilliant animalier, instructed him from an early age, as did his uncle, Charles de Toulouse-Lautrec.
Featured in the April 11, 2025 auction of Rare Books, Autographs & Maps is his only surviving schoolbook, Geoffroy's Nouveau Dictionnaire Éleméntaire. Latin-Français, which he used as a reference while studying for his baccalauréat. The sixteen-year-old first sat for the exam, for which a working knowledge of Latin was an essential and integral part, in 1880. After initially failing, he retook it in 1881, and this time he passed. He seems to have been a reasonable Classicist, by all accounts, but like any bored schoolboy, he doodled in his books. However, Lautrec was an artist of genius who had been tutored in drawing for years, and the sketches in the margins of his dictionary demonstrate skills far beyond the average.
The book, which survives in surprisingly good condition, is simply bound in contemporary drab buckram, a typical covering for schoolbooks. It is inscribed on the cover: H. de Toulouse-Lautrec. Dictionnaire Latin | T.L. Within are roughly 440 pen-and-ink drawings by Lautrec on approximately 110 pages, including the endpapers, the title-page, and the margins of text pages. These were executed about 1878-81.
The playful sketches include many lively, compelling drawings of horses, and it is these, perhaps more than any other theme, that draw the eye. Writing about this book in 1955, Aldous Huxley observed "... when the learned foolery of grammar and versification became unbearable, he would ... dip his pen in the ink and draw a tiny masterpiece. Dictionnaire Latin-Français. Above the words is a cavalryman galloping to the left, a jockey walking his horse towards the right. Coetus and Cohaerentia are topped by a pair of horse's hoofs, glimpsed from the back as the animal canters past. Two pages of the preface are made beautiful, the first by an unusually large drawing of a tired old nag, the second by a no less powerful version of the three horses in tandem which adorned the flyleaf." On the front pastedown, two quatrains in Toulouse-Lautrec's elegant script appear among the drawings. The first reads "Si tente de demon, Tu derobes ce livre, Apprends que tout fripon, Est indigne à vivre" (If, driven by a demon, you steal this book, know that no rascal merits to live); a second verse, written in alternating Latin and French, appears below a drawing of a pierrot hanged on a gallows, saluted by a dapper gentleman in a top hat. Translated, the verse reads, "Look at Pierrot hanged, who did not return the book; if he returned it, he would not have been hanged."
Auction Friday, April 11, 2025 at 10am
Exhibition April 5-7
