Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, 'Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando', 1879

Hanging from the ceiling by her teeth, is trapeze artist and aerialist Miss La La. She performed at the Cirque Fernando, which was built in 1875 near the Place Pigalle in Paris, not far from Degas’s studio. Miss La La was born Anna Albertine Olga Brown (1858-1945) to an African-American father and a white mother, in Kupfermühle, Prussia (current Poland). She began performing at age nine and travelled with different companies and acts throughout Europe. From 1879, she began using her stage name Miss La La and became well-known for her famous ‘Iron Jaw’ act. The performance, in which she was lifted to the roof of the circus, hanging by her teeth, gained much admiration for her incredible feats of strength. Together with her circus-partner Theophila Szterker (1864-1888), professionally known as Kaira la Blanche, Miss La La performed as the acrobatic duo ‘Olga and Kaira’, holding up Kaira from a trapeze between her teeth.

In his only circus painting, Degas shows Miss La La in the middle of her signature Iron Jaw act. She is depicted while clenching a leather mouthpiece, which was made specifically for her act. The painting shows her hoisted up into the air by a pulley, extending her arms in opposite directions, as if mid-flight. Her purple-coloured leotard is decorated with golden adornments and a white fringe, which contrasts with her brown skin and tights. The upwards view of Miss La La conceals her face and expression, seemingly hiding her identity from the audience.

Degas made several preparatory studies for the painting, sketching Miss La La in different positions and outfits. His studies show a few adjustments to Miss La La’s pose, experimenting with the placement of her limbs. Still, it was mainly the background with which Degas struggled most. He had trouble finding the correct way to depict the perspective of the high sealing, as well as the architectural lines of the arcades, windows and roof trusses. According to his friend, British artist Walter Sickert, Degas needed the help of an architecturally skilled draftsman to assist him with sketching the ceiling. Miss La La is placed in the upper left corner of the composition, so it is the structure of the roof itself – the paired windows, beams, girders and gild decoration – that mostly fills the painting. Her pose is clearly integrated within the structure: the lines of her arms and lower legs form a parallel with the diagonal lines of the angled green girders, just as her thighs echo the vertical supports.

Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando differs from other 19th-century paintings of circuses. In most works, the composition is focused on either the circus ring or the audience. Degas’s composition, however, is aimed upwards, towards the ceiling of the building. The post-impressionist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, one of Degas’s contemporaries, made numerous depictions of circuses, in which he almost exclusively focused on the circus ring. His compositions are often seen from above, as if looking down from one of the top seats. To emphasize the performances, Toulouse-Lautrec eliminated the audience in most of his works and left the bleachers empty. Georges Seurat, another post-impressionist, depicted various circus members in his work Les Cirque (1890-1), including a female performer on a white horse, some tumbling clowns and a neatly coiffed ringmaster.

In painting a highly foreshortened figure suspended in space and seen from below, Degas may have been seeking to emulate the expansive ceiling paintings by Italian Baroque and Rococo artists such as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and Giovanni Battista Piazzetta. Degas would have known these works from his early years in Italy in the 1860’s and visiting again in 1873, a few years before he painted Miss La La. Our view of the skilled trapeze artist directly reproduces a viewpoint often used by Tiepolo, such as in his An Allegory with Venus and Time (ca. 1754-8), also found in the National Gallery collection. The upwards view of the goddess Venus and Time, mirrors the angle in which Miss La La is depicted. By ascending her to an orange-green ceilinged heaven, Degas compares Miss La La’s godlike strength to the Venus in Tiepolo’s allegory.