Playing Doctor with Toulouse‐Lautrec

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec occupies a paradoxical position in histories of French art. In this chapter, the author explores the matrix of masculinity, medical culture, and friendship in Lautrec's work through an analysis of his portraits of male friends who were physicians. Rather than trying to fit Lautrec into a “normative” and “masculinist” narrative, she provides a more complex account of Lautrec's identity and artworks by showing how they exemplify the interdisciplinary character and group dynamics of the late nineteenth-century French art world. The structures of male sociability, and their visual representation, allowed Lautrec and his friends to play within and outside of their own masculinities and occupational personae. Lautrec's paintings of his medical friends and male peers, as well as the photographs documenting his social circles, highlight the complexity of masculinities and friendships in late nineteenth-century French culture, as well as the cross-disciplinary social structures of the Parisian art world.