Polin

"Polin" is a sophisticated and intimate print created by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in 1898. This late-career work is executed as a crayon lithograph, utilizing gray-black ink printed on delicate china paper. Dating from the final years of the nineteenth century, the piece exemplifies Toulouse-Lautrec's profound dedication to the graphic arts, a medium he utilized extensively to document the personalities, theaters, and private lives of Belle Époque Paris.

The choice of lithography allowed the artist to achieve the broad, painterly texture seen in the crayon medium, lending immediacy and subtle tonal variation to the portrait. While much of his oeuvre focuses on female performers, Polin captures a male subject, rendered with Toulouse-Lautrec’s characteristic sharp, observational style. He captures the figure with an intimate candidness typical of his approach to documenting the era's celebrities and common men. The relative sparsity of line and the focus on shadow and contour demonstrate why this master excelled at creating powerful artistic prints.

Produced shortly before his premature death, this lithograph confirms Toulouse-Lautrec's position as a brilliant chronicler of modern urban life and a technical innovator in printmaking. Given the age and classification of the piece, images of this work often enter the public domain, making them widely accessible for study and appreciation. This exemplary impression of Polin is currently held in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ensuring its preservation as a key example of fin-de-siècle French graphic art.