Earlier this year, I went to the Courtauld Gallery to see a special exhibition of the masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection (of Winterthur, near Zurich). 

It was a wonderful show - full of exciting paintings which had never been seen in England before.

Oskar Reinhart was born from a wealthy Winterthur family who ran a leading international trading company. More interested in art than business, he began collecting seriously in 1919. He eventually had to step back from the firm to devote himself fully to building his collection. This included impressionists and Renaissance works. He built a gallery which he then bequeathed to the Swiss Confederation, which opened to the public in 1970.

Rating: 4/5 ★★★★☆

Absolutely gorgeous.

The joie de vivre. 

It really does feel like the viewer is watching a joyous moment frozen in time, with the summer feeling.

The intimacy and affection of all people - though, I must admit, Renoir’s painted face seem to miss a certain something.

I saw this Renoir masterpiece at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

The “Moulin de la Galette” (wiki) started off as a windmill and became an open-air dancehall and café. It was frequented by wealthy Parisians and artists.

This painting is huge, and the painting was done en plein air so Renoir captured the dappled light effect through the trees.

✲✲✲✲✲

This post is a few impressionist paintings from my recent visit to the Courtauld.

✲✲✲

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère by Manet - 1882

This was Manet’s last masterpiece.

Manet was never fully appreciated by the public. He submitted this to the Paris Salon of 1882 to negative reception. Critics just didn’t get it, they found it unsettling. He became disillusioned and ill. In April 1883, he died two weeks, after a leg amputated below the knee, due to syphilitic infection. Monet and Zola would help carry his coffin. 

And what a great painting - a complex composition involving a mirror (and, therefore, undoubtedly postulating something about the Parisian 19th century “reality”), and executed quite beautifully. Alluring.

According to the gallery:

In this work, Manet created a complex and absorbing composition that is considered one of the iconic paintings of modern life.

✲✲✲

Study for “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” (Luncheon on the Grass) by Manet - 1863

This was a preparatory work for the masterpiece at the Musée d’Orsay.

It’s very interesting and makes you think.

This painting’s subject was considered shocking and scandalous in its depiction of the “everyday” and unidealised with the inversion of Renaissance traditions of the female figure.

As above, Manet draws inspiration from the contemporary and everyday ordinary people — in opposition to the academy.

✲✲✲

Banks of the Seine at Argenteuil by Manet - 1874

I went to a wonderful exhibition recently on Degas’s painting of “Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando”.

The National Gallery is currently celebrating its bicentennial birthday. And this exhibition is a lovely touch. It combines drama and spectacle with art and race. What makes this show so refreshing is that it is free of our present day identity-politics and ideological framing.

I had already covered this painting some years back on a visit; so it was a pleasure to see it again.

It was based on newly discovered information about the painting and its sitter.

✲✲✲

Part 1

Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando by Edgar Degas (1879)

A stunning painting.

Miss La La (the acrobat) is ascended towards the rafters of “Cirque Fernando” via a rope clenched between her teeth. Captivating, and slightly horrifying. 😳

The architecture intensifies the dramatics. Her real name is Anna Albertine Olga Brown. Born in 1858 in Prussia (Poland) to a white mother and African American father. She died in 1945. In her time, she reached international fame.

In 1879, aged 21, Degas had attended one her performances at the Cirque Fernando in Paris. He found her mesmerising & painted her suspended gracefully at her most perilous moment.

Her sketched her many times, and invited her to pose in his studio.

This painting was then dispatched to 4th Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1879.

Part 2 - Photographs of Olga

✲✲✲

Part 3 - The Cirque Fernando (Degas & Renoir)

Miss La La was the highlight of the show and she became a sensation.

In 1879, Renoir also painted a scene set at Cirque Fernando, showing other acrobats. He was also a keen circus-goer.

Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando by Renoir (1879)

A more static pose by Renoir.

This painting shows 2 acrobat sisters Francisca (on left) and Angelina Wartenberg.

They are wearing costumes identical to Miss La La’s. They have concluded their performance & are gathering oranges tossed over by the audience.

They are pretty, pale, glittery with an aura child-like sweetness. A total opposite of Degas’s strong and fearless gymnast prodigy.

Beautiful golden daubs over fine brushstrokes.

✲✲✲

Some of Degas’s notes and sketches:

Part 4 - Degas and the “Black World”

Degas painted Olga with her natural hair and dark skin colour.

The exhibition explains that Degas was born of a Creole mother (of European descent) from New Orleans. And it suggested that this may have had an effect.

For me, it doesn’t seem obvious either way. He visited New Orleans in 1872 and it seems he was impressed by the sight of the sizeable black population. He was also fascinated by the juxtaposition of dark and light, and described Black people walking in the bright sunlight like “silhouettes”.

✲✲✲

Courtyard of a House (New Orleans sketch) by Edgar Degas

This scene was from Degas’s family home in New Orleans.

His family employed a black nanny who is on the left and is looking after Degas’s nephews and nieces. He paints her crunched low, cropped, and with a rather large hat on her head covering her.

It is clear this little girl (turning to look at us) was special. I love the addition of the family dog (also gazing at us).

✲✲✲

Lady in Black by Edgar Degas

In this painting, Degas experiments with the effect of light pouring through the white linen curtain.

He called it the “contre-jour” (i.e. against day) which creates a silhouetting effect. It gives the sitter a dark shape in which her identity disappears.

For me, I don’t think this was the effect he was striking in his “Miss La La” painting at all.

✲✲✲

Part 5 - The painting’s afterlife

A rather sad note about the painting:

Once complete, Degas sent his painting of Miss La La to the Fourth Impressionist exhibition in Paris. It was one of his most ambitious works ever shown at any of these independent shows he had helped organise. Yet the painting attracted little attention and did not sell. Degas kept it in his studio for almost 25 years, before it was sent to exhibitions outside France, including a major show of Impressionist paintings in London in 1905. Bought by a Canadian billionaire, the picture spent the next twenty years or so in Toronto, before being purchased for the National Gallery in 1925, with the Courtauld Fund.

By then Degas had died and Olga, long retired in Brussels, likely never saw the painting at the National Gallery. Miss La La inspired in British painters of the period several circus-themed artworks: celebrations of agility, movement and colour, imbued with the same atmosphere of excitement as Degas’s painting.

✲✲✲

The Daredevils by Thérèse Lessore (1927-1934)

The exhibition shows us Lessore’s portrayal of

the World’s Fair in Islington, London. The curved arches of the building & green columns are all nods to Degas’s composition.

Lessore married Walter Sickert (below) as her second husband in 1926.

✲✲✲

The Trapeze by Walter Sickert (1920)

A friend of Degas’s.

Sickert saw the painting of Miss La La hanging in his Paris apartment in 1885.

According to the gallery:

The Trapeze owes a clear debt to the Impressionist master’s picture, with its daring upwards perspective: a swaying figure on a swing stretches her arms to reach a trapeze, her body aligned with the radiating seams of the circus tent above her.