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Lot Essay
Please see the note to the preceding lot.
Lautrec was confined at Dr. Semelaigne's clinic in Neuilly for treatment of his chronic alcoholism for about two and a half months between early March and mid-May 1899. By mid-April he was allowed to take supervised trips off the institution's grounds. His series of circus drawings proceeded apace. Julia Frey described his progress: "As the finished drawings accumulated, Henry's confidence grew. He was going out regularly to Paris now, on business, to lunch with friends and family, even to his mother's [Mme de Toulouse-Lautrec was responsible for having had the artist committed against his will]. He began to take control of his life again. He persuaded his mother to ask the doctors to look at his drawings and to review his case. She, the doctors, and Henry were all eager for the whole ordeal to be over. Six weeks had passed since the last conference. On 17 May, the doctors met again. This time, Henry passed" (in Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life, London, 1994, p. 471). Back in Paris, while preparing to visit his family in Albi, the artist wrote to an unidentified correspondent, "Lautrec is out of gaol" (Letters, no. 574).
Lautrec was proud of his circus album, which by any comparison was an extraordinary feat of sustained, virtuosic draughtsmanship, like a composer's musical variations on a theme, carrying forth characters and visual motifs from one sheet to the next. These drawings, numbering 37 in all (as published in the Dortu catalogue), are among his most masterly, and comprise one of the final, crowning achievements of his career. Not least of all, they served their immediate purpose--Lautrec declared as he departed the clinic, "I've bought my release with my drawings" (quoted in M. Joyant, op. cit., 1926, p. 222).
The present drawing exemplifies one of the chief themes in the Au cirque sequence: the pathetic plight of an unfortunate animal trained to perform comic tricks before the public. An Asian black bear rides atop a horse, another animal more commonly broken and trained; the bear was probably also disciplined into performing some awkward dance steps, as in circuses even to this day. Lautrec probably had in mind the bear called "Caviar," who performed at the Nouveau Cirque in 1888. Elsewhere in the series there are a performing baboon, an elephant, a number of dogs, and even a small pig. 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 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 the 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).
Maurice Joyant (1864-1930), the life-long friend of the artist and his first biographer, was the first owner of the Au Cirque drawings. In 1890 Joyant became the director of the Gallery Goupil et Cie on the boulevard Montmartre, where he gave Lautrec his first solo exhibition in 1893. Goupil et Cie later reorganized under the name of Manzi, Joyant et Cie. In 1905, four years after Lautrec's death, Manzi-Joyant issued a volume of 22 Au cirque drawings reproduced in facsimile, fulfilling the artist's wish that the drawings be published together in book form.
Lautrec was confined at Dr. Semelaigne's clinic in Neuilly for treatment of his chronic alcoholism for about two and a half months between early March and mid-May 1899. By mid-April he was allowed to take supervised trips off the institution's grounds. His series of circus drawings proceeded apace. Julia Frey described his progress: "As the finished drawings accumulated, Henry's confidence grew. He was going out regularly to Paris now, on business, to lunch with friends and family, even to his mother's [Mme de Toulouse-Lautrec was responsible for having had the artist committed against his will]. He began to take control of his life again. He persuaded his mother to ask the doctors to look at his drawings and to review his case. She, the doctors, and Henry were all eager for the whole ordeal to be over. Six weeks had passed since the last conference. On 17 May, the doctors met again. This time, Henry passed" (in Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life, London, 1994, p. 471). Back in Paris, while preparing to visit his family in Albi, the artist wrote to an unidentified correspondent, "Lautrec is out of gaol" (Letters, no. 574).
Lautrec was proud of his circus album, which by any comparison was an extraordinary feat of sustained, virtuosic draughtsmanship, like a composer's musical variations on a theme, carrying forth characters and visual motifs from one sheet to the next. These drawings, numbering 37 in all (as published in the Dortu catalogue), are among his most masterly, and comprise one of the final, crowning achievements of his career. Not least of all, they served their immediate purpose--Lautrec declared as he departed the clinic, "I've bought my release with my drawings" (quoted in M. Joyant, op. cit., 1926, p. 222).
The present drawing exemplifies one of the chief themes in the Au cirque sequence: the pathetic plight of an unfortunate animal trained to perform comic tricks before the public. An Asian black bear rides atop a horse, another animal more commonly broken and trained; the bear was probably also disciplined into performing some awkward dance steps, as in circuses even to this day. Lautrec probably had in mind the bear called "Caviar," who performed at the Nouveau Cirque in 1888. Elsewhere in the series there are a performing baboon, an elephant, a number of dogs, and even a small pig. 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 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 the 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).
Maurice Joyant (1864-1930), the life-long friend of the artist and his first biographer, was the first owner of the Au Cirque drawings. In 1890 Joyant became the director of the Gallery Goupil et Cie on the boulevard Montmartre, where he gave Lautrec his first solo exhibition in 1893. Goupil et Cie later reorganized under the name of Manzi, Joyant et Cie. In 1905, four years after Lautrec's death, Manzi-Joyant issued a volume of 22 Au cirque drawings reproduced in facsimile, fulfilling the artist's wish that the drawings be published together in book form.