Descendant of an old aristrocratic French family dating back more than a 1000 years, Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) spent most of his life among the Parisian demimonde, in the twilight world of fin-de-siecle Paris. Lautrec was not one of those mythm-makers who doubted the world of reality of perception. He had this astonishing ability to understand the conditions of the socially ostracized milieu which enabled him to look behind the facade of a crumbling bourgeois civilization. Lautrec was fascinated by the pompous gesture of a mime, a funny hair ribbon, the tired expression of a barman or the luxurious arrangement of a feather boa. Although women were at the center of Lautrec's interests, nudes make only a sporadic appearance in his work.