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.

Equestrienne (At the Cirque Fernando)

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French, 1864–1901)

1887–88

Medium: Oil on canvas
Classification: Painting
Dimensions: 100.3 × 161.3 cm (39 1/2 × 63 1/2 in.); Framed: 123.2 × 181 × 8.3 cm (48 1/2 × 71 1/4 × 3 1/4 in.)
Culture: France
Museum: Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
Credit line: Joseph Winterbotham Collection
Rights: Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
Who can see it: Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed

About this work

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.

This is one of thirty-five works that comprise the Winterbotham Collection. Click here to learn more about the collection.