Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando (Francisca and Angelina Wartenberg)
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919)
1879
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 131.2 × 99.2 cm (51 1/2 × 39 1/16 in.); Framed: 160.1 × 129 × 10.2 cm (63 × 50 3/4 × 4 in.)
- Culture
- France
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Credit line
- Potter Palmer 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
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
This painting depicts a favorite Parisian pastime in the late nineteenth century: attending the circus. Among the enthusiastic crowds at these events were men on the prowl in a world of young female entertainers. But Pierre-Auguste Renoir barely alluded to the unwholesome aspects of this environment, relegating a group of dark-suited men, seated in the front row, to the very top of the composition. “For me a picture . . . should be something likeable, joyous, and pretty,” Renoir insisted. “There are enough ugly things in life for us not to add to them.”
Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando reflects this worldview as well as the artist’s enchantment with the innocence of childhood. The two circus girls in this painting, Francisca and Angelina Wartenberg, were actually seventeen and fourteen years old, respectively, when Renoir made this painting, although they appear much younger here. Although they were acrobats in the circus, Renoir posed the sisters in costume at his studio, allowing him to capture them in daylight—he feared that the circus’s harsh gas lighting would turn “faces into grimaces.” He portrayed them standing in the middle of the circus ring, having just finished their…
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
