The Circus Tent, ca. 1906

Guy Pène du Bois returned to New York in 1906, after spending a year living the life of the bon vivant in Paris.  During the voyage back, Pène du Bois’s father passed away. Thus, arriving in New York, Pène du Bois need a livelihood.  He quickly found a job working as a newspaper reporter (and before long as an opera critic). With a workday commencing at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, Pène du Bois’s mornings were devoted to painting.  Describing his working method, he explained, “…[the paintings] were usually completed in one to three hours. Memories of an incident not seen more than the day before …”[i]

One can imagine The Circus Tent being painted in just this way – quickly and from a motif Pène du Bois had actually seen. A set of short, even dabs represent the knees of a long row of children sitting in the first row.  Smudges hint at the faces.  Clothing was brushed in briskly. Three long white brushstrokes serve to define the tarp of the tent. And yet, there are many details in this work. For example, the children’s clothing is highly differentiated – a short suit with a red neck bow; a white dress with a matching white hat or a red ensemble (in the second row); a dark double-breasted jacket with large gold buttons and long pants; a group of black top hats contrasted with a ladies brown bonnet.[ii]  Through modeling and highlights, Pène du Bois conveys the weight of the green tarp as it buckles and sways. While spindly legs support the bench in the second row.

Painted about a year after Billiards in Paris, 1905, the later work shares some stylistic similarities with the earlier one.  In both works, a diagonal thrust creates a sense of depth.  In addition, Pène du Bois uses a dark, limited palette of freely applied paint in each. The trio of highlighted green glass lampshades in Billiards in Paris are visually echoed by the bright brushstrokes at the top of the tent’s canvas panels. Both depict a crowd of people partaking in one amusement or another offered by a big city at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Precedents exist for Pène du Bois’s circus theme in works by Edgar Degas, James Tissot, and Georges Seurat, for example.[iii] So too, contemporary Ashcan examples include: William Glackens’s, The Circus Parade (1895, Private collection) and George Bellows’s (The Circus, 1912, Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass.). These works demonstrate a late nineteenth and early twentieth century interest in images of popular entertainments, which ranged from the theater and opera, to ballet, the café concert, horse races and boxing, and, later on, movie theaters.[iv] As Valerie Ann Leeds has explained, during this period, “the pursuit of leisure became an intrinsic part of urban society.”[v]   Among Henri’s circle, Everett Shinn is perhaps best known for this type of scene. Shinn’s Theater Box (1906, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York) is one example among many.

Pène du Bois’s composition is notable for depicting an audience, exclusively.[vi]  While the audience played a growing role in most images of popular culture, the performers were usually shown as well. In The Circus Tent, there is no hint of the spectacle being presented – no glimpse of costume or corner of a stage.  Further, Pène du Bois’s superficial treatment of the faces denies us, for the most part, the delight we expect to see on the spectator’ faces. The only figure reacting is the ghost-like onlooker sitting at the end of the second row.  Does her disdain function as the artist’s social commentary?  Similarly puzzling figures are found in works such Pène du Bois’s Billiards in Paris, cat. no. 7 and Carnival (1927, Private collection, New York) .  Ultimately, the audience themselves are the subject of our gaze. Barbara Weinberg noted,

“… the American painters of modern life focused on the audience more often than they did on the performer …For turn-of-the-century looking – at fine art, at displays of technology or consumer goods, at public performances, and, of course, at one another – had become a self-conscious spectator sport.”

The fascination with looking and being ‘looked at’ in works such as The Circus Tent is remarkably prescient of our self-aware obsessions today.

[i] Guy Pène du Bois, Artists Say the Silliest Things (New York: American Artists Group, 1940), p. 150-51.

[ii] Based on their costumes, Alexander Rich pointed out that these are not lower class New Yorkers.  H. Alexander Rich, “Artist or Critic? Guy Pène du Bois and the Search for Artistic Identity” (PhD diss., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2013), p. 81.

[iii] See Edgar Degas, Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando (1879, National Gallery, London); James Tissot, The Circus Lover (1885, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston); and Georges Seurat, The Circus (1891, Museum of Modern Art, New York).

[iv] See John Sloan, Movies, Five Cents (1907, Private Collection).

[v] Valerie Ann Leeds, “Pictorial Pleasures: Leisure Themes and the Henri Circle,” in James Tottis et. al., Life’s Pleasures: The Ashcan Artists’ Brush with Leisure: 1895-1925 (Detroit: Detroit Institute of Art, 2007), p. 23.

[vi] See also, for example, Mary Cassatt’s At the Opera (1879, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and Reginald Marsh’s Monday Night at the Metropolitan (1936, University of Arizona, Tuscon).  Both of these examples were published in H. Barbara Weinberg et. al., American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885-1915 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1994), pp. 202, 213.