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Lot Essay
The clownesse in this drawing and the preceding lot is Mademoiselle Cha-U-Kao, who appears elsewhere in Lautrec's lithographs and drawings during the mid-1890s, as well as in another drawing in the Au cirque series (Dortu, no. 4.528). Her unusual stage name was perhaps intended to sound fashionably Japanese. Indeed, there are pronounced elements of japonisme in the spatial configuration of the Au cirque drawings, as elsewhere in Lautrec's oeuvre; and the artist depicted the female audience in Au cirque: ballet (D. no. 4.556) wearing Japanese hairstyles and costumes. Cha-U-Kao was, of course, French, although little else is known about her, and her name was actually a phonetic transcription of chahut-chaos, a popular and exuberant dance similar to the 'can-can'. Lautrec normally depicted Cha-U-Kao wearing her platinum blonde hair in a topknot, and clad in pantaloons and a chiffon ruffle, as seen in the preceeding lot and two oil paintings of 1895 (D., nos. P.581 and 583), or in a ruff, as seen here.
In both the preceding and the present drawings, Lautrec has shown Cha-U-Kao performing with a trained animal - a horse in the former, a small pig here. Richard Thomson has observed, "If Lautrec's great 1899 circus series is about training and discipline, about forcing animals to act against their nature to suit their human masters, to sublimate their physical instincts to his or her own command, then it is also about the artist's plight.... Lautrec may well have seen his own situation at the clinic in this light. He too was being forced to control his urges, to obey rules, to conform to a certain code of conduct.... In the end the whole series is about order - at one level the discipline of circus performances, and at another the artist's psychological order. Both involve restraint and a degree of pain; both require mastering nature. The circus served as an ideal metaphor for the disordered Lautrec to articulate pictorially his inner struggles and traumas" (in Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., 2005, p. 241).
In both the preceding and the present drawings, Lautrec has shown Cha-U-Kao performing with a trained animal - a horse in the former, a small pig here. Richard Thomson has observed, "If Lautrec's great 1899 circus series is about training and discipline, about forcing animals to act against their nature to suit their human masters, to sublimate their physical instincts to his or her own command, then it is also about the artist's plight.... Lautrec may well have seen his own situation at the clinic in this light. He too was being forced to control his urges, to obey rules, to conform to a certain code of conduct.... In the end the whole series is about order - at one level the discipline of circus performances, and at another the artist's psychological order. Both involve restraint and a degree of pain; both require mastering nature. The circus served as an ideal metaphor for the disordered Lautrec to articulate pictorially his inner struggles and traumas" (in Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., 2005, p. 241).