In February 1895, at one of the most exclusive parties in Paris, a shaven-headed host in a white linen bartender's jacket personally mixed an estimated two thousand cocktails and was reportedly the only person left standing at the end of the night. He was Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, heir to a count's title, who abandoned his aristocratic roots for the cabarets and brothels of Montmartre. This episode explores how his physical disability and outsider status gave him the perspective to revolutionize modern art.

We begin in Albi in 1864 with parents who were first cousins, the genetic bone condition that left his legs fragile after two femur fractures at ages 13 and 14, and the months of bed rest where he turned to sketching horses. We follow him to Paris in 1882, into the brothels where he found people of his own stature, and to the 1889 openi ...