Women of Paris: The Circus Lover

In 1880 a wealthy Parisian horseman, Ernest Molier, built a wooden ring around the riding stable of his house near the Bois de Boulogne and began putting on circuses in which the performers were his friends. Counts and barons rode, fenced and swung from the trapeze, and a few hundred invited guests came to watch their own kind play at being acrobats and clowns. Tissot's picture is usually linked with this amateur circus, and the museum describes the event simply as a high-life circus whose performers came from the aristocracy. Up under the roof, performers in red and white hold their poses on the trapeze. Down in a box at the front, a woman in pink with a fan looks straight out at us, as if we had just taken the seat beside her. Tissot showed the canvas in Paris in 1885 under the title Les Femmes de sport, and in London the next year as The Amateur Circus. One of its later owners was the novelist Florence Henniker, a close friend of Thomas Hardy.