Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando (Francisca and Angelina Wartenberg)

This painting depicts a favorite Parisian pastime in the late nineteenth century: attending the circus. Among the enthusiastic crowds at these events were men on the prowl in a world of young female entertainers. But Pierre-Auguste Renoir barely alluded to the unwholesome aspects of this environment, relegating a group of dark-suited men, seated in the front row, to the very top of the composition. “For me a picture . . . should be something likeable, joyous, and pretty,” Renoir insisted. “There are enough ugly things in life for us not to add to them.”

Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando reflects this worldview as well as the artist’s enchantment with the innocence of childhood. The two circus girls in this painting, Francisca and Angelina Wartenberg, were actually seventeen and fourteen years old, respectively, when Renoir made this painting, although they appear much younger here. Although they were acrobats in the circus, Renoir posed the sisters in costume at his studio, allowing him to capture them in daylight—he feared that the circus’s harsh gas lighting would turn “faces into grimaces.” He portrayed them standing in the middle of the circus ring, having just finished their act and taking their bows. One sister turns to the crowd, acknowledging its approval, while the other faces the viewer with an armful of oranges, a rare treat that audiences tossed in tribute. Renoir enveloped the girls in a virtual halo of pinks, oranges, yellows, and whites, as if acknowledging the rose-colored lens through which he preferred to view such scenes. The painting’s first owner, Chicago collector Bertha Honoré Palmer, became so enamored of it that she kept it with her at all times, even on her travels abroad.