Project for Frontispiece to: Au pied du Sinaï

Project for Frontispiece to: Au pied du Sinaï is a lithograph created by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in 1898. This print demonstrates the artist's late-career engagement with graphic design and specialized book illustration during the flourishing print culture of fin-de-siècle France. As a design for a frontispiece, the work served a critical functional role, intended to introduce and encapsulate the themes of the associated literary text, likely relating to travel or biblical accounts given the explicit reference to Mount Sinai.

Toulouse-Lautrec was globally renowned for his sophisticated mastery of lithography, utilizing the medium to achieve a graphic spontaneity and dynamism often associated with drawing. While the artist is perhaps best known for his large-scale posters depicting Parisian nightlife, this piece shows his adaptability in approaching complex illustrative tasks. The preparatory nature of the work provides valuable insight into his rigorous process for creating commercially successful imagery. Toulouse-Lautrec retains his characteristic economical line and powerful sense of composition even when addressing the technical constraints of book illustration.

Created just three years before his death, this lithograph confirms Toulouse-Lautrec's status as a pivotal figure in modern printmaking. The final, published illustration influenced subsequent generations of graphic artists. Today, high-quality prints and reproductions of many of the artist's works from this pivotal French period are frequently available through public domain collections. This important print, Project for Frontispiece to: Au pied du Sinaï, is housed in the permanent collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, preserving a key example of the artist’s work outside of the poster medium.