Rare to find a man who is privileged to be exempt from the rigors of the common man and yet to be  so enamored with the little dramas of their lives as to look on them with such  and human understanding.

The painter Henri Toulouse was one of these rare breeds, descent of a noble family who painted his subjects, the whores, actors, musicians and rough and hewn middle class of France with a smile and sometimes a sympathetic grimace for the nightly dramas meat grinder  that they threw themselves into over and over again.