In the later part of the 1800s rapid change was taking place all across Europe. The Industrial Revolution had reached its peak in all areas of the continent and transition was now taking place everywhere people went. Cities and towns were growing in size and the population burst forth into a new era of urbanization. Men, women and children alike were moving out of the farm lands and into the towns which were, by now, becoming hustling, bustling centers of industry. These changes greatly influenced every aspect of life weather it being economic, political or social. Many artists of this time choice to mirror society and its changes in their work. Artists such as Henri Toulouse Latrec, Edvard Munch, and Pablo Picasso were few among the many who chose to show the effects of urbanism on society as individuals and as a whole.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was born on November 24, 1864, in southern France. Son and heir of Comte Alphonse-Charles de Toulouse, he was the last in the line of an aristocratic family that dated back a thousand years. As a child, Henri was weak and often sick. But by the time he was ten years old he had begun to draw and paint. At age twelve Toulouse-Lautrec broke his left leg and at fourteen his right leg. The bones did not heal properly, and his legs ceased to grow. Deprived of the physical life that a normal body would have permitted, Toulouse-Lautrec lived completely for his art. He dwelt in the Montmartre section of Paris, the center of the cabaret entertainment and bohemian life that he loved to depict in his work. Dance halls and nightclubs, racetracks, prostitutes - all these were memorialized on canvas. He pictured the underbelly of society in a real, true to life manner. He captured their feelings and emotions in every painting. For example in his "Woman Pulling Up h!.
er Stockings,"" Latrec shows a day in the lives of "low class- prostitutes. They seem to be the lowest of society for no upper class lady would dare let anyone see her in such a compromising situation.
