The Flickr Montmartre Image Generatr

Montmartre, Paris, France.

The Eighties
Paris
1985 Paris, Montmartre

Basilique du Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre. Cloudy days can be hard to work with, but it did allow for the detail here to show really nicely without any shadows.

Adoration du Sacré-Coeur

Nikon AF 80-200 f/4,5-5,6 | Sony A7II | Rawtherapee

DSC08687ra

When the Cirque Fernando opened in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris in 1875, the Impressionists, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, quickly became frequent visitors. Here, Renoir featured 17-year-old Francisca Wartenberg (left) and her sister, 14-year-old Angelina (right), members of an itinerant German acrobatic troupe. Although Renoir painted the girls in the natural light of his studio rather than onsite at the circus, he posed them as if they were taking their bows after a performance, gathering up the tissue-wrapped oranges tossed to them as tributes by members of the audience.

As a septuagenarian long retired from the circus ring, Angelina Wartenberg, the model for the girl on the right in this painting, wrote in 1938 from her home in London to her niece, Marguerite Streckfus, of San Rafael, California: “I am sending you now a little picture that will interest you [Acrobats]; it is your mother [Francisca] and myself when we were beginning our careers as Circus Kids; the big one is of course your dear Ma, being three years my Senior—so you see, I am the greedy one, and collar most of the oranges the public pelted us with.” In this delightful firsthand account from a Renoir model, Angelina clarified that she and her sister were not jugglers, as the artist’s biographer Georges Rivière identified them in 1921, but rather were participating in a traditional ritual of appreciation shown toward child performers in the circus. This custom was recounted by Edmond de Goncourt in his novel Les frères Zemganno, published in 1879, in which a child gymnast, age five, receives a similar ovation. Until Angelina’s reminiscences became known, the girls’ identities had long been forgotten; indeed, they appear to have been irrelevant to Renoir when he described the work in the early twentieth century to the art dealer Ambroise Vollard as “des fillettes jouaient avec des oranges.” The models may simply have represented for Renoir a generalized subject of leisure entertainment in the Third Republic. Throughout the 19th century, clowns and acrobats brought distraction and momentary joy to Parisian audiences. During the 1870s, the Wartenberg girls were just two of a teeming multitude of itinerant circus performers who passed through Paris—to date no notice of their performance has come to light in the daily schedules of circuses that appeared in city newspapers—yet Renoir endowed them with an elegance of form and a sensitivity that is usually associated with portraiture. His models would be forgotten today were it not for the serendipitous introduction of biographical detail in 1938, which transformed Acrobats into a noncommissioned portrait, allowing us to test the accuracy of the artist’s rendering.

See Toulouse-Lautrec's painting and painted tambourine set at the same circus, below.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841-1919), painted in 1879. Oil on canvas.

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.)

Art Institute of Chicago (ARTIC 1922.440)

This work, set at a circus, captures the tense moment in which a female trick rider prepares to stand up on her horse and leap through a paper hoop held by a clown. The horse gathers speed, spurred on by the whip of famous ringmaster Monsieur Loyal. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec may have based the garishly made-up rider, dressed in a tutu of gauze and sequins, on Suzanne Valadon, a former circus performer, model, and artist with whom he had a nearly three-year relationship. The rider seems to snarl at Monsieur Loyal, who glares back at her. Toulouse-Lautrec’s setting is the same circus in Montmartre depicted in Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s portrait of the Wartenberg sisters (in the collection at ARTIC).

This is one of thirty-five works that comprise the Winterbotham Collection at the museum.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French, 1864–1901), painted in 1887-88.

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.)

Art Institute of Chicago (ARTIC 1925.523)

Heuliez Bus GX 137 Électrique n°7128 (ligne 40) du réseau RATP à Paris (75).

Heuliez Bus GX 137 Électrique n°7134 (ligne 40) du réseau RATP à Paris (75).

Heuliez Bus GX 137 Électrique n°7130 (ligne 40) du réseau RATP à Paris (75).

Heuliez Bus GX 137 Électrique n°7129 (ligne 40) du réseau RATP à Paris (75).

Heuliez Bus GX 137 Électrique n°7127 (ligne 40) du réseau RATP à Paris (75).

Heuliez Bus GX 137 Électrique n°7129 (ligne 40) du réseau RATP à Paris (75).

Heuliez Bus GX 137 Électrique n°7128 (ligne 40) du réseau RATP à Paris (75).

Paris, 75, FRANCE