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Lot Essay
Lautrec was confined at Dr. Semelaigne's clinic in Neuilly for treatment of his chronic alcoholism for about two and a half months between early March and mid-May 1899. By mid-April he was allowed to take supervised trips off the institution's grounds. His series of circus drawings proceeded apace. Julia Frey described his progress: "As the finished drawings accumulated, Henri's confidence grew. He was going out regularly to Paris now, on business, to lunch with friends and family, even to his mother's [Mme de Toulouse-Lautrec was responsible for having had the artist committed against his will]. He began to take control of his life again. He persuaded his mother to ask the doctors to look at his drawings and to review his case. She, the doctors, and Henri were all eager for the whole ordeal to be over. Six weeks had passed since the last conference. On 17 May, the doctors met again. This time, Henri passed" (in Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life, London, 1994, p. 471). Back in Paris, while preparing to visit his family in Albi, the artist wrote to an unidentified correspondent, "Lautrec is out of gaol" (Letters, no. 574).
Lautrec was proud of his circus album, which by any comparison was an extraordinary feat of sustained, virtuosic draughtsmanship, like a composer's musical variations on a theme, carrying forth characters and visual motifs from one sheet to the next. These drawings, numbering 37 in all (as published in the Dortu catalogue), are among his most masterly, and comprise one of the final, crowning achievements of his career. Not least of all, they served their immediate purpose--Lautrec declared as he departed the clinic, "I've bought my release with my drawings" (quoted in M. Joyant, op. cit., 1926, p. 222).
The present drawing exemplifies one of the chief themes in the Au cirque sequence (Dortu, nos. D.4.522-560): the pathetic plight of an unfortunate animal trained to perform comic tricks before the public. A piglet sits up before the famous Mme Cha-U-Kao who was a dancer and clown at the Nouveau Cirque and the Moulin Rouge. Elsewhere in the circus series there is a performing baboon, an elephant, and a number of dogs. Richard Thomson has observed, "If Lautrec's great 1899 circus series is about training and discipline, about forcing animals to act against their nature to suit their human masters, to sublimate their physical instincts to his or her command, then it is also about the artist's plight. Lautrec may well have seen his own situation at the clinic in this light. He too was being forced to control his urges, to obey the rules, to conform to a certain code of conduct. In the end the whole series is about order--at one level the discipline of circus performances, and at another the artist's psychological order. Both involve restraint and a degree of pain; both require mastering nature. The circus served as an ideal metaphor for the disordered Lautrec to articulate pictorially his inner struggles and traumas" (Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2005, p. 241).
Lautrec was proud of his circus album, which by any comparison was an extraordinary feat of sustained, virtuosic draughtsmanship, like a composer's musical variations on a theme, carrying forth characters and visual motifs from one sheet to the next. These drawings, numbering 37 in all (as published in the Dortu catalogue), are among his most masterly, and comprise one of the final, crowning achievements of his career. Not least of all, they served their immediate purpose--Lautrec declared as he departed the clinic, "I've bought my release with my drawings" (quoted in M. Joyant, op. cit., 1926, p. 222).
The present drawing exemplifies one of the chief themes in the Au cirque sequence (Dortu, nos. D.4.522-560): the pathetic plight of an unfortunate animal trained to perform comic tricks before the public. A piglet sits up before the famous Mme Cha-U-Kao who was a dancer and clown at the Nouveau Cirque and the Moulin Rouge. Elsewhere in the circus series there is a performing baboon, an elephant, and a number of dogs. Richard Thomson has observed, "If Lautrec's great 1899 circus series is about training and discipline, about forcing animals to act against their nature to suit their human masters, to sublimate their physical instincts to his or her command, then it is also about the artist's plight. Lautrec may well have seen his own situation at the clinic in this light. He too was being forced to control his urges, to obey the rules, to conform to a certain code of conduct. In the end the whole series is about order--at one level the discipline of circus performances, and at another the artist's psychological order. Both involve restraint and a degree of pain; both require mastering nature. The circus served as an ideal metaphor for the disordered Lautrec to articulate pictorially his inner struggles and traumas" (Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2005, p. 241).