Louise Weber danced the quadrille at the Moulin Rouge with her partner, a wine merchant from the rue Coquillère whose extraordinary suppleness earned him the nickname Valentin le Désossé, the boneless one^[1]. Weber's own nickname, La Goulue, meant the greedy one, given for her enormous appetite^[1]. Within Montmartre she became one of its defining figures, credited by some accounts with helping to popularise the can-can^[2]. Lautrec painted her again and again through these years, alone, surrounded by friends, or caught mid-performance, and the pair became close friends in the process^[1].

In 1891 the Moulin Rouge's owners, Oller and Zidler, commissioned Lautrec to design the poster announcing the opening of that year's cabaret season^[1]. He drew La Goulue dancing with the outline of Valentin sketched over a crowded background behind her, her pink blouse and white skirt rendered so they seemed to glow with light^[1]. The commission put Lautrec in direct competition with Jules Chéret, the most fashionable poster artist working in Paris at the time, and Lautrec's poster won decisively: it became a sought-after collector's item within a day of appearing on the city's walls^[1]. For Lautrec it marked the discovery of a new form of art, poster design, which he went on to make into a serious graphic medium rather than mere advertising^[1].

Toulouse-Lautrec was born in 1864 at the family chateau of Le Bosc, near Albi, into an aristocratic line whose ancestors had taken part in the crusades^[2]. His parents, Count Alphonse and Countess Adèle, were first cousins, married in part to consolidate a family line that had grown weak, and the closeness of their blood is thought to have contributed to his fragile health^[2]. As a teenager he broke first one thigh and then, some fifteen months later, the other leg in separate falls; neither healed properly, and his legs stopped growing while the rest of his body developed normally, leaving him permanently short and unable to ride or hunt in the way his father had hoped^[2]. Shut out of the conventional life expected of a man of his birth, he turned instead to drawing and to the nightlife of Montmartre, painting its dancers, singers and performers in what one historian called a brutally frank but compassionate manner^[2].