penwithlit

Each Spring, travelling circuses around the world break out of their winter quarters and migrate to cities to bring entertainment to their masses. Much-changed now from their form in their heyday in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were among the earliest forms of mass entertainment, long before movies.

Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), Circus Maximus (1876), oil on panel, 86.5 x 155 cm, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. The Athenaeum.

It was the Romans who not only coined the name, but transformed older and purer athletic events into spectacle soaked with sweat and blood, as recreated by Jean-Léon Gérôme in his Circus Maximus of 1876. This shows four-horse chariot racing taking place in the largest of all the stadiums in Rome, capable of holding a crowd of over 150,000.

These lived on in fairs throughout the Middle Ages and later, but it wasn’t until the late eighteenth century that…

Continuing my series looking at Les Nabis, I turn next to Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), a painter and print-maker whose work I thought I knew until I started to research what was going to be just one or two articles.

I then realised that to do him any justice at all would require a series of four or more – and that’s without considering his prints. I hope that you’ll agree by the end of this series that Vallotton was a key figure in the development of modern figurative painting in the twentieth century. And that his paintings are wonderful.

Félix Édouard Vallotton was born in Lausanne, in Switzerland, and moved to Paris in 1882 to study under Jules Joseph Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger at the Académie Julian. His early influences included the paintings of Ingres, and he started painting portraits which followed the academic tradition.

Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), Self-portrait at…

By the start of the twentieth century, the former Nabi artist Maurice Denis (1870–1943) was firmly in the avant garde, his paintings evolving away from his earlier Nabi style, and making series of prints. He had started serious print-making around 1890, and had made woodblocks for music by Debussy. His prints became even more important in the early twentieth century, when he illustrated writings by an eclectic range of authors including Dante, Verlaine and Saint Francis of Assisi.

Maurice Denis (1870–1943), Boat to Saint Breton, or Portrait of Albert Clouard as a Saint (1903-06), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Musée des beaux-arts de Morlaix, Morlaix, France. Wikimedia Commons.

Many of Denis’ themes remained religious, such as his Boat to Saint Breton, or Portrait of Albert Clouard as a Saint painted between 1903-06. This may refer to a legend of the life of the first Breton saint, canonised in…