Interpretive Resource

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was of aristocratic ancestry, but he opted to become an artist. Sickly from childhood and dwarfish in stature, he was a fixture of the bawdy nightlife of Montmartre, rendering its stars and denizens with an honesty that was sometimes cruel. Influenced by Edgar Degas as well as by artists in Paul Gauguin’s circle, Toulouse-Lautrec staked out an aesthetic terrain between illustration and high art, producing a body of work that consolidated the reputation of bohemian Paris as a center of sexual outlawry and adventurism.

Equestrienne (At the Cirque Fernando), a depiction of a performance at a permanent circus in Montmartre, was Toulouse-Lautrec’s first important painting. He probably executed it in haste for the fifth exhibition of Les Vingt, held in Brussels in February 1888. The work’s skewed perspective and cropped figures derive from the art of Degas and from Japanese prints, while the limited palette, spare composition, and linear economy anticipate Toulouse-Lautrec’s well-known lithographic posters of the 1890s. But it is the painting’s psychosexual candor that makes it potent. The ringmaster—piscine of profile, imbued with menace by his whip and confident stride—glares at the female rider, who throws him a tense, ambiguous smile. Seated precariously on a muscular horse lumbering toward the paper hoop through which she will soon jump, the performer is on display, her tulle skirt blown back to reveal her thighs and hips. This spectacle of implicit sadistic cruelty is observed by an audience whose sparsity and impassivity suggest dream imagery, as does the incongruous splayed strut of the clown at the doubts on this point.