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Equestrienne (At the Cirque Fernando)

Painting of a performance inside a circus ring. A man wearing a suit holds a whip in his hand and looks towards a woman with red hair riding a gray horse and wearing a green dress. Audience members wearing suits and top hats watch from red and white benches on the side.
CC0 Public Domain Designation

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  • Painting of a performance inside a circus ring. A man wearing a suit holds a whip in his hand and looks towards a woman with red hair riding a gray horse and wearing a green dress. Audience members wearing suits and top hats watch from red and white benches on the side.

Date:

1887/88

Artist:

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
French, 1864-1901

About this artwork

This work, set at a circus, captures the tense moment in which a female trick rider prepares to stand up on her horse and leap through a paper hoop held by a clown. The horse gathers speed, spurred on by the whip of famous ringmaster Monsieur Loyal. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec may have based the garishly made-up rider, dressed in a tutu of gauze and sequins, on Suzanne Valadon, a former circus performer, model, and artist with whom he had a nearly three-year relationship. The rider seems to snarl at Monsieur Loyal, who glares back at her. Toulouse-Lautrec’s setting is the same circus in Montmartre depicted in Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s portrait of the Wartenberg sisters.

Status

On View, Gallery 242

Department

Painting and Sculpture of Europe

Artist

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Title

Equestrienne (At the Cirque Fernando)

Place

France (Artist's nationality:)

Date  Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

1882–1892

Medium

Oil on canvas

Inscriptions

Inscribed lower left: HT Lautrec

Dimensions

100.3 × 161.3 cm (39 1/2 × 63 1/2 in.)

Credit Line

Joseph Winterbotham Collection

Reference Number

1925.523

IIIF Manifest  The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world.

Learn more.

https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/16146/manifest.json

Extended information about this artwork

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.

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