Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Just like the courage, unordinary creative personalities influence the progress of the history the history and time they live at influence their lives. Creative personality forms under influence of the Zeitgeist of certain age, so was Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec influenced by the time and conditions he lived at. Toulouse-Lautrec was an aristocrat by birth, he was a son of cousins and there's an opinion that his life was cursed from the very beginning. Toulouse-Lautrec was famous artist and lithographer; his works were distinctive by their realism and candour. This significant artist was a student of Leon Bonn and Farnan Cormon, but, frankly speaking, they caused no influence on the artistic style of Lautrec as. To his opinion, they were too ordinary. Unlike those two artists Degas became an iconic personality for Lautrec, that was the artist that influenced the style of Toulouse-Lautrec. The gifted artist was impressed by the uncovered reality of Degas's paintings and so Degas became a teacher for Lautrec.
In his childhood Lautrec was fond of horse riding and one day he fell down the horse and damaged his legs and backbone, since that day stunt and for the rest of his life remained the fourteen-years-boy-tall man. Doctors claimed that was the result of injury but people who believed in sacred rules of marriage stated that was the result of the marriage between cousins and that injury and stun are divine retribution. One way or another Toulouse-Lautrec stun and wasn't able to lead common for every aristocrat way of life and so he concentrated on painting. There also was no chance for Toulouse to meet a woman who would love him as he was, he realized it and left attempts and spent his whole life wandering the bordellos. He used to say that bordello is the only place where one may have its boots perfectly cleaned.
Life at bordellos was the main factor that influenced the style of Toulouse-Lautrec. He lived at bordellos and so mostly painted courtesans and the reality that surrounded them. That is why his paintings were distinctive among all other paintings of that time with their brutal reality, which was so thoroughly hidden by other painters and the society at all. As a result paintings of Lautrec were considered as those that disgrace the art and nation and so were forbidden. Even his grandfather has never recognized Toulouse the painter as his grandson. After Lautrec died all his paintings were trespassed to his grandfather, who slumped those and burned at once.
So, Toulouse-Lautrec was a painter who revealed the hidden reality of society, who showed that art is called upon reflection the real life with all its defects but not only upon glorifying the beauty of this world, as people must know this world in all its facets.