Henri Toulouse-Lautrec Posters ~ Appreciation Lesson Ideas

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters are famous and epitomize the Post Impressionist style.

As a start our study of Toulouse-Lautrec, an Impressionist painter, we read his biography and wrote a short biography on our Famous Impressionist Artists Biography pages.

(Just a note, parents should carefully select and sensitively discuss Lautrec’s life and works with their children as his personal life and his interest in the  lives of the people of the circus and cabaret halls could be offensive or disturbing.)

www.yaneff.com gives a clear written biography and a very interesting (but please pre-view) 5 minute video of Toulouse-Lautrec’s life.  Most the posters are on one page with clear thumbnails of Toulouse-Lautrec art.

I printed the Toulouse-Lautrec minibook from my Famous Impressionist Artist Lapbook.  We have been combining our notebook and minibook pages instead of making a lapbook. (The girls paste their minibook on their biography page.)

We viewed all his posters on www.Lautrec.info.

We discussed the lines, shapes, colours and style Toulouse-Lautrec used in his posters. (Compare these at a later stage with his paintings.)

I asked the children to take note of the balance between the writing and the pictures.

We discussed important facts about poster’s writing ~

• Printing must be clear, bold, easy to read.
• Simple message with just a few important words.
• People read words at the top of the poster before the words below the pictures.
• Words painted in all UPPER case are bolder and make more impression than lower case letters.
• Simple style curls or italics give an artistic feel to the writing.

Here are UPPER case and lower case letter pages ~

Poster Letters Upper Case

Poster Letters Lower Case

I printed the posters in postcard size.

I traced them and created a simple outline.

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Toulouse-Lautrec painted in flat, simple areas of colour.  This makes the posters very simple to copy.

The kids chose their poster to colour.

You can enlarge the poster to full-page if the postcard size is too small.  My kids liked them smaller than our normal art pages and could paint several posters. (I will upload their completed posters once they have coloured them.)

Here is Toulouse-Lautrec posters, prints, my outlines and poster letter pages for you to download.  (It has 17 pages so it may take a while to open.)  Click the title below:

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Posters