Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was born on November 24, 1864, in southern France. Son and heir of Comte Alphonse-Charles de Toulouse, he was the last in the line of an aristocratic family that dated back a thousand years. As a child, Henri was weak and often sick. But by the time he was ten years old he had begun to draw and paint. At age twelve Toulouse-Lautrec broke his left leg and at fourteen his right leg. The

Pablo was born in 1881 to a poor family in Maglia, Spain. The son of an art teacher Picasso’s talent was recognized at an early age. He moved back and forth from Spain to Paris where he encountered many new and different styles of painting. He was greatly influenced by the style of Latrec. From 1901 to 1903 Picasso initiated his first truly original style, which is known as the blue period. Restricting his color scheme to blue, Picasso depicted poverty stricken, depressed figures whose body language and clothing show the lowliness of their social status. In “The Old Guitarist.” Picasso emphasized the guitarist's poverty and position as a social outcast, which he reinforced by surrounding the figure with a black outline, as if to cut him off from his environment. The guitarist is compressed within the canvas (no room is left in the painting for the guitarist to raise his lowered head), suggesting his helplessness: The guitarist is trapped within the frame just as he is trapped by his poverty. Like Latrec, Picasso depicts a low class woman sitting solitary and alone in his “Melonchaly Woman.” She seems to be deep in contemplation and a look of despair is seen in her facial expression. Her surroundings are very bleak, almost prison like, which could also represent the feeling of imprisonment in her social standings . She seems to be trapped in her own “dream world” of pain and suffering. Although Picasso underscored the unpleasantness of his figures during this period, neither their clothing nor their environment conveys a specific time or place. This lack of specificity suggests that Picasso intended to make a general statement about human alienation rather than a particular statement about the lower class in Paris. Picasso’s idea of social alienation appeared to be a main theme among most post-impressioni

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