Exhibition: Discover Degas & Miss La La

Degas’s 'Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando' takes centre stage in this exhibition that sheds light on this work with newly discovered information about the painting and its sitter.

This radical Impressionist masterwork records an extraordinary moment and features a remarkable figure – the circus artist Miss La La, or Anna Albertine Olga Brown (1858‒1945).

In 1879 Degas made the talented aerialist the subject of one of his most original and arresting paintings, capturing her in one of her most striking and perilous acts. Suspended from a rope held between her teeth by a leather mouthpiece, Miss La La is hoisted up towards the ceiling of the Cirque Fernando

Featuring new material, from rare, previously untraced drawings of her by Degas, to entirely unpublished photographic portraits of Miss La La, the exhibition turns the spotlight on her, and on the painting, telling their story for the first time at the Gallery.

Focusing on one of Degas’s masterpieces, and his only painting depicting a non-white sitter whose identity is known, the exhibition will also look at how Degas himself represented and related to people of colour. Although he was himself the son of a Creole mother (of European descent) and was fascinated by the ethnic diversity he saw during a trip to New Orleans in 1872‒73, Degas is believed to have only painted two works representing people of colour. Drawing on recent academic research, a section of the show will investigate his complex relationship to the representation of race.

As the painting, acquired for the nation in 1925 thanks to the Courtauld Fund, is about to celebrate 100 years in the collection of the National Gallery, the exhibition also looks at how it influenced and inspired British art in the 1920s. Works by artists such as Thérèse Lessore and Duncan Grant form the final section of the exhibition, looking at how Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando inspired British artists after the First World War and beyond.