Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec is one of the impressionist artists. He lived in the same era as Charles Laval, Eugene Boch, FrancoisGauzi, Louis Anquentin, Emile Bernard and Van Gogh (all of them were memeber of Cormon studio). Cormon studio itself was a liberal-minded salon artist, kept an atelier that was a major center of Post-Impressionism, or rather, to be precise, of that splinter-group of Post-Impressionist style known as cloissonism, from the French “cloisonne”, an enamelling procedure. Occasionally, Henri imitated the techniques of this craft also. The technique involved highly abstract zones of colour, often contained in dark outlines and clearly defined. In the art of enamels, or indeed in the lead framing of stained glass, outlines of this kind had self-evident technical reasons, but the cloisonnists made a virtue of the autonomous artistic value of the formal process. Toulouse-Lautrec’s style showed very strong use of “Japanese” elements: the absence of shadows, diagonal lines in the composition, and certain decorative arabesques.