HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC | Au cirque: dans les coulisses

Estate of the Artist
Alphonse de Toulouse-Lautrec (the artist's father, by descent from the above)
Comte Robert de Toulouse-Lautrec (by descent from the above in 1930; until 1963)
Dr Tomasini, Paris
Galerie Motte, Geneva
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1973

Rennes, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Toulouse-Lautrec et son milieu familial, 1963, no. 66, illustrated in the catalogue

M.G. Dortu, Toulouse-Lautrec et son œuvre, New York, 1971, vol. V, no. 3.056, illustrated p. 497

Executed on cream wove paper and laid down on a card mount. There is a faint mount stain visible along all four edges, which is not visible when framed. There are a few faint scattered spots of foxing in places. This work is in overall good condition.
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As a chronicler of popular culture and the night life of Belle-Epoque Paris, Toulouse-Lautrec had no rivals. Born into an aristocratic French family in 1864, Toulouse-Lautrec spent much of his life among the Parisian demi-monde, revealing his genius in sharp, analytical portrayals of the twilight world of the fin-de-siècle metropolis. A brilliant interpreter of this lively and debauched world, Toulouse-Lautrec was not interested – as so many of his contemporaries were – in social critique. Whether it was the quick sketch of a face, the curving lines of a group of dancers, a scene in a café, at the Théâtre des Variétés or in a maison close, he succeeded in capturing the timeless humanity that lay beneath the façades of his subjects. Executed in 1888, the present work reveals the artist's deeply humanistic approach to his subjects, while at the same time offering a fascinating insight into the spirit of its time.

Toulouse-Lautrec was a frequent visitor to the circus in Paris, as Richard Thomson wrote: 'The circus was deeply ingrained in Toulouse-Lautrec's imagination. He knew the world of horses from his childhood. No doubt as a boy he had been taken to the circus. And in the early 1880s, while in his teens and taking his first steps as a painter under the informal tutelage of the deaf-mute painter René Princeteau, he became fascinated by the ring, often visiting the Cirque Fernando in Montmartre' (Richard Thomson, 'The Circus', in Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. & The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, p. 237). These visits inspired a group of paintings and drawings executed between 1886 and 1888, including the present work Au cirque: dans les coulisses. Toulouse-Lautrec's rendering of the circus theme was to culminate in an ambitious and monumental canvas, now destroyed, and a larger version of the same year painted in grisaille, previously in the collection of the Newark Museum, New Jersey (fig. 1). 

In the present work, Toulouse-Lautrec has eliminated references to the circus as a public spectacle, focusing instead on a group of figures during a more informal moment, probably just before or after appearing on stage. Writing about the larger oil painting (fig. 1) for which Au cirque: dans les coulisses is a closely related study, Richard Thomson notes: 'A painting of behind-the-scenes at the circus, in which a clown pats a horse while a female performer and a lugubrious man look on, was one of his first resolved compositions. Executed in grisaille, it marks Toulouse-Lautrec's transition from the more conventional execution he had learned in Cormon's studio to the modern, dynamic, and improvised manner he would develop in the later 1880s. We might even argue that the circus, which demanded from the artist a style that echoed its own perpetual movement, vulgar color, and wicked sense of fun, helped Toulouse-Lautrec formulate the very mobile and graphic handling that was the hallmark of his mature work' (ibid., p. 238).