I am quite incapable of doing them [making landscapes], even the shadow. My trees look like spinach and my sea like heaven knows what.. ..[the Medite… - Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

There are two young Englishmen in the next rooms to ours who are superb; their two sisters, looking like umbrellas, are here too, dressed in pink, with a little friend in blue with red hair. She is a type I have tried to draw on horseback but have not succeeded.

Lautrec was still satisfying his rather classical art-teacher Cormon in Paris. The unreal conventions of Cormon imposed and discouraged him, according to Henri Perruchot

I'm very much alone all day, I read a litle but, in the long run, it gives me a headache. I draw and paint as much as I can, indeed till my hand grows tired, and when night begins to fall I hope Jeanne d'Armagnac [his cousin] will come to my bedside. She does sometimes, and cheers me up and plays with me, and I listen to her talk, without daring to look at her. She is so tall and so beautiful! And I am neither tall nor beautiful.