Cathy's Art Diary

Small exhibition at Somerset House looking at the history and current practice of circus. It is the 250th anniversary of Philip and Patty Astley founding the first circus on the banks of the Thames. I’d read about them before in the book “Burning Bright” by Tracey Chevalier where they featured as characters in a story about William Blake. The section on the history was fascinating and it also talked about the spread of circus in the US with the growth of the railways and the famous Cirque Medrano in Paris which featured in Impressionist paintings. It talked about how circus has often attracted independently minded people and rule breakers and how there have always been itinerant performers even before the first circus with jesters and there were even jugglers at the Colosseum. It also looked at how artists have represented the circus with nice examples by Laura Knight and Degas.   The modern section looked at alternative acts today with a good video of current ac...

Excellent workshop at the National Gallery looking at the influence of circus and music hall on art in the later 19th and early 20th centuries. The morning focused on France and the circus taking Degas’s “Miss La, La and the Cirque Fernando” as a starting point. Jo Rhymer from the gallery talked about the picture and why it was so ground breaking. She also talked about the Cirque Fernando and its influence on other artists then introduced us to Miss La, La herself. In a second talk she looked at how Toulouse-Lautrec had also depicted this circus. Cultural historian, Fern Riddell, then talked about other aerial acts and the phenomena of these performances both in France and England. She also talked about the strong position held by these female performers in society as they outstripped male performers in salary and this gave them independence. In the afternoon we focused more on the British music hall with the novelist Essie Fox talking about her novel the Somnambulant...