Toulouse-Lautrec always seemed to go against the grain. From his early childhood, he lived the life of a young member of the nobility, riding horses and going on outings. But he also made jokes and continually filled notebooks with scribbles, astutely capturing the movements and expressions of those around him. His life was active, he was drawn to motion, but the bones in his legs ached and were so quick to break, so that by the time he was a teenager, they were stunted forever, and Henri would never be taller than 4’11’’ (1,50m). The Butte, too, is fragile. In Lautrec’s time, as in our own, it towered over the rest of Paris. But its insides are hollow, and when its roads began to be cobbled and paved, some sank in uncontrollably, swallowing trees, houses, and even inhabitants.

Lautrec was born into one life, but was irresistibly drawn to another. He left behind the elegant, conventional ways of his familial estate in Albi, and came to Paris to study art. Montmartre, too, started out as something else – a holy place, a vineyard, a village. And yet, by the time Toulouse-Lautrec arrived, the village was changing. Its low rental fees and sweeping vistas, as well, maybe, as its innate rebellious spirit (a hang-out for Revolutionaries, the origin of the 1870 Commune), was luring artists of all kinds to come and hang their hats and paintbrushes and chisels on its plaster and stone cottage walls.

In Montmartre, Lautrec met friend and fellow artist Emile Bernard. He met Vincent Van Gogh, to whom he remained loyal even when Van Gogh’s outward strangeness and explosive behavior became impossible for others to deal with. Lautrec painted a pastel portrait of him, shining with yellows and blues. In Montmartre Lautrec met and fell in love with many women, among them Suzanne Valadon, a talented and headstrong young painter. Their relationship was stormy and full of lows and highs – a real bohemian love story, that eventually dissolved. Henri met more people on the Butte, like the singer Aristide Bruant, whose bold voice filled Montmartre’s cabarets with stories of the common man, the poor artist, the downtrodden. Asked to do a series of advertisements for Bruant’s act, Lautrec single-handedly revolutionized the graphic arts, by simply showing the singer in a variety of poses, including from the back, singing to an invisible crowd. And there were the dancers and performers at the Moulin Rouge – La Goulue (“The Glutton”), who drank the remaining liquid out of everyone’s glasses, Valentin le Desossé, who danced so well and so flexibly it was as though he had no bones at all, Jane Avril, with her grave expression and madly moving, black-stockinged legs. This was Montmartre, bold performers, eccentrics, a ragtag mix.

Like them, Lautrec’s art was far from conventional. Even today, more than a hundred years after he created them, his bold depictions of life in dancehalls and brothels, can shock a viewer. The lines and contours are frenetic, images seem so fast and somehow incomplete. Torsos and faces sometimes go uncolored, or are blotched with color, as though there was no time for refinement – and there wasn’t, because Lautrec was portraying movement, the moment, the frenzy of the cancan, the leap of the trapeze artist into the air, the racing of horses or bicycles.

With its nightclubs and cabarets, its brothels and insomniac artists, it can be said that Montmartre was a place that never slept. In many accounts of people who knew Toulouse-Lautrec, even when he was tired, even when he was hung over, he was always “awake.” Drifting through alcoholic absinthe hazes, his two eyes behind their spectacles took in everyone who passed by. Then, or later, his brush or pencil would capture their gestures, their motions, their faces, all that was essential. Look at a portrait by Lautrec and you are watching a second frozen in time– La Goulue’s leg lost in the froth of her skirts, the Clownesse Chao-Kao calmly donning her costume for the night’s performance at the Moulin Rouge.

Lautrec loved to laugh and joke, he loved to take photo’s dressed in strange costumes. He caricatured others, and himself no less, he mocked conventional masterpieces like Puvis de Chavanne’s Le Bois Sacré, by reproducing the entire canvass and adding his friends, himself among them small and bow-legged, pissing in the grass. He played more artistic jokes, like a series of “paintings” in seltzer water on white canvasses – these jokes would later be considered forerunners to modern artistic movements like Dada. Lautrec loved to cook, to make merry. He could spend all night out in the glittering lights. But like the streets of the Butte on cold, cloudy mornings, he was also possessed of sorrow; like the holes in the ground of Montmartre’s hill, his infirmities led to horrible destruction.

Lautrec didn’t only paint the happy nightlife; drawn to the brothels for, it turns out, more than just a good time, he often spent months among the prostitutes, watching their personal lives, depicting them sleeping, waiting, being impersonally examined. His series of brothel paintings aren’t a landmark of Belle Époque erotica – instead, they are some of the most human works to come out of the era. Lautrec’s most fatal infirmities, in the end, weren’t physical, but deep as those holes in the Butte’s ground. Alcohol and excess led him to lose his senses; he was put into an asylum where he screamed that spiders were running all over him. Still, he needed to paint and draw. Out of the asylum, back in, he suffered crises and seizures. In 1901, towards the start of the new century, he died, only thirty-seven years old.

Many people set the dates for the Belle Époque, the era of Montmartre’s heyday, at 1871-1914 – about forty years. Toulouse-Lautrec’s life was almost as long. Like that period, Lautrec’s spirit, and the verve and life of his work, live on, at once the vision of a moment, and a memorial of a bygone time that can still be felt, sometimes, when walking along the steep streets of the Butte Montmartre.