3-002-506 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

At the Circus: Free Horses, 1899. This drawing is one of 39 sheets the artist made in the spring of 1899 while he was in a mental hospital in Neuilly being treated for alcoholism. While it is popularly held that the series was done entirely from memory as a demonstration that Toulouse-Lautrec had regained his mental faculties, Perussaux suggested that the artist may very well have been allowed out of the hospital with a companion to visit the Molier circus, which is known to have been held nearby during his stay there (New York, 1953: 2). This theory is supported by the conspicuous absence from some of the drawings of an audience, suggesting that the artist may have been sketching during rehearsals. All of his earlier depictions of the circus, e.g., "In the Cirque Fernando: The Ringmaster," 1888 (The Art Institute of Chicago), show spectators; indeed, the artist's examination of spectatorship as a bourgeois activity at the theater, café-concerts, or dance halls is a hallmark of modernity.