Each month, Isabel from The Little Grand Tour lends her insight to our art themes with a page in our instruction booklets. She adds wonderful context and suggests further art pieces to look at, or indeed, places, to go out and see.
To add depth and dimension to your child’s creative education, we highly recommend The Little Grand Tours – art teachers take children in small groups around art, either in museums or galleries or even in parks or on the streets of London!
To extend the theme this month for our Captivating Circus box, Isabel suggests seeing a piece from the National Gallery:
“My most favourite circus painting is Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando by Degas which is in Gallery C at the National Gallery in London. The viewpoint from underneath, the ¾ pose and twist of the body of Miss Lala is really cutting edge for the time. The colours are warm and atmospheric. Miss Lala was a performer with the Cirque Fernando which was built in 1875 near the Place Pigalle in Paris, close to where Degas lived. He saw Miss Lala perform there several times. Her real name was Olga and she was a mixed-race circus performer famous for her strength! I wish we could see her face too – in this painting she is suspended in the air by her teeth – can you imagine! The painting was shown at the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1879.”
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