Interpretive Resource

TOULOUSE-LAUTREC’S URBAN WORLD In the Circus Fernando: The Ringmaster is Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s first major work. Probably begun in 1887, it was finished by 1888 and exhibited in the lobby of the famous night club the Moulin Rouge. It both predates and pre-figures Georges Seurat’s 1890 masterpiece Le Cirque (Musee d' Orsay, Paris); and its rhythmic contours, staining technique, and boldly graphic composition anticipate later works by artists as diverse as Edvard Munch and Pierre Bonnard. Toulouse-Lautrec himself learned many lessons in this painting, lessons he later applied to his now world-famous posters, as well as to the circus drawings he made while confined to a mental hospital at the end of his life.

The artist who made this painting was full of confidence, energy, and wit. He chose as his subject the well known Circus Fernando, which both Renoir and Degas had already painted and which was to remain a major subject of French painters from Seurat to Lager. By the late nineteenth-century, circuses had increasingly come to be permanent attractions, housed in buildings designed specifically for them. The Circus Fernando was the first such circus constructed in Paris.

In Toulouse-Lautrec’s painting, an exotically dressed, red-headed woman rides a large, gray stallion and two clowns perform tricks. The woman's eyes turn directly to the ringmaster, whose aggressive, cruel face regards her without remorse as he whips the horse forward. Whether or not her plight is contrived as part of the show, it is made all the more riveting because the spectators included in the painting pay no attention to her.

It is the simultaneity of activities that makes the picture so modern. Rather than focusing our attention on a single, central motif, Toulouse-Lautrec energized the peripheral events. One clown almost disappears off the left edge of the canvas, and the lower half of another seems to have dropped in from the top. The center of the picture is a void whose emptiness is charged by the cracking of a whip.

Moulin de la Galette was very likely made with Renoir’s Ball at the Moulin de la Galette (Musee d' Orsay, Paris) of 1876 in mind. In the 1870's, when Renoir went to the famous entertainment hall at the top of Montmartre, it was a thriving, open-air cafe concert where one spent weekend days drinking mulled wine or beer, chatting, and dancing. By 1889, the Moulin de la Galette had declined in popularity, supplanted by evening cafe concerts such as the Moulin Rouge.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s painting takes us far from the sunlit, innocent world of Renoir. Against a back-drop of dancers, interpreted in caricature-like fashion, sit four figures. The most beautiful is the young woman at the lower left who turns away from the dance floor to look at something or someone outside of the picture. She is, in many ways, an archetypal woman of the fin de siecle, a distant muse lost in her own thoughts. Her superb profile almost glows, expressing her vulnerability in the raucous, almost vulgar, public setting.

The two other women, one older and the other thinner than the first woman, sit passively, waiting to be asked to dance. The single man behind them seems unaware of their presence. He extends his body over the railing as he looks intently beyond the picture plane, counteracting the gaze of the beautiful woman in the opposite direction. In this way, Toulouse-Lautrec suggests the ultimate isolation of urban dwellers like these, as well as the futility of their hopes and permanence of their loneliness.