Equestrienne (At the Cirque Fernando)

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec · 1887–88

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

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.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Post-Impressionism

Painted when Toulouse-Lautrec was just twenty-three, this sweeping canvas captures a bareback rider mid-performance at the Cirque Fernando, the beloved Montmartre circus he visited obsessively throughout the late 1880s. Lautrec was already developing the radical compositional instincts that would define his career — here, the viewer is placed high above the sawdust ring, looking down at an angle that flattens and elongates the arena in a way clearly indebted to Japanese woodblock prints and to Degas, whom Lautrec admired deeply. The equestrienne at the centre is rendered with a fluid, almost calligraphic energy, her figure bold against the pale oval of the ring, while the cracking whip of the ringmaster anchors the lower left with theatrical tension. Degas himself reportedly saw the finished work and praised it — a moment of recognition that carried real weight for the young Lautrec, who had idolised him for years. Our hand-painted oil reproduction faithfully recreates the original's distinctive palette and loose, confident brushwork, giving you the same visceral sense of movement and spectacle that has made this one of Lautrec's most celebrated early canvases — rendered by skilled artists working directly from high-resolution reference of the Art Institute of Chicago's original.