Toulouse-Lautrec, poster child of Bohemia

Harriet Beecher Stowe had used it in Uncle Tom’s Cabin to describe both children and a small adult, but it was Barnum, as great and merciless as master of the levers of sentiment as Dickens, who popularized the m-word when advertising the outsized talents of Colonel Tom Thumb, Commodore George Washington Nutt, and Lavinia Warren. If ‘Les stars’ retain their uncanny immortality, it is because of Toulouse-Lautrec, who made us all the audience of his gorgeous and cruel freak show. Toulouse-Lautrec’s first poster for the Moulin Rouge, La Goulou (1891), anatomizes the business of show perfectly.

Source: spectator.us