Soon after moving to Paris, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) dedicated himself to chronicling a new kind of Parisian life. He was a painter who captured the exhilarating society of le demi-monde and its establishments: racecourses, circus tents, theaters and opera houses, cabarets and brothels.

In a mature career of only ten years, Toulouse-Lautrec produced 368 prints and lithograph posters, which he considered of equal importance to his paintings and drawings. Toulouse-Lautrec began to experiment with lithography at the same time as his contemporaries Alfonse Mucha and Théophile Steinlen. Because of their work, lithographs and posters were elevated from the status of mere mass advertising media to an accepted artistic genre. La Bohème charts the growth of print media in this period through Toulouse-Lautrec's lithographic oeuvre, in which the artist developed his distinctive loving, unsparing vision of Belle Époque Paris.