In February 1895, at one of the most exclusive parties in Paris, a shaven-headed host in a white linen bartender’s jacket personally mixed an estimated two thousand cocktails and was reportedly the only person left standing at the end of the night. He was Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, heir to a count’s title, who abandoned his aristocratic roots for the cabarets and brothels of Montmartre. This episode explores how his physical disability and outsider status gave him the perspective to revolutionize modern art.

We begin in Albi in 1864 with parents who were first cousins, the genetic bone condition that left his legs fragile after two femur fractures at ages 13 and 14, and the months of bed rest where he turned to sketching horses. We follow him to Paris in 1882, into the brothels where he found people of his own stature, and to the 1889 opening of the Moulin Rouge that made him the visual chronicler of Parisian nightlife. We unpack the grueling lithography process, the influence of Japanese ukiyo-e prints, his portraits of La Goulue, Yvette Guilbert and Aristide Bruant, his friendship with Oscar Wilde, his legendary cooking, the absinthe-and-cognac Earthquake cocktail, the hollow cane that hid liquor, and his death at 36 in 1901.

• How a biological echo chamber of aristocratic inbreeding produced brittle bones that stopped growing at five feet
• Why fellow artists saw solidarity rather than exploitation in his years living among sex workers
• Lithography on limestone slabs and how disposable Japanese prints reshaped the French poster
• Psychological isolation in a crowded room: painting the party and the hangover at the same time
• The sanatorium circus drawings made from memory, his final insult to his father, and the museum in Albi