Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts

Provenance:

Senator William Benton, Southport, CT
By descent in the family

The Louise Benton Wagner Trust

Exhibited:

Guy Pène du Bois: Artist About Town, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; October 10-November 30, 1980; traveled to Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, illus. no. 4 in catalogue.

Guy Pène du Bois began his formal art training at fifteen years of age, at the New York School of Art in 1899 (known at the time as the Chase School, after William Merritt Chase). Pène du Bois fell quite under the influence of the dandyish Chase, and he learned the technique of painting rapidly, so as to get one’s ideas onto the painting plane before they were lost. Chase also exposed his students to the work of master painters, including Velasquez and El Greco.

But Pène du Bois’ greatest early influence was Robert Henri, who taught at the school beginning in 1902. Henri, the leader of “The Eight” believed that painters should practice an immediate, raw type of realism. He insisted on the use of wide brushes in his class, and like Chase, stressed the need to record the subject matter quickly. Whereas Chase’s dictum could be summarized as “art for art’s sake,” Henri believed in “art for life’s sake,” teaching that artists should paint what they saw and knew, not from Classical or Renaissance ideals. Henri also instructed his students to darken their palettes, using primarily earth colors: these he regarded as being necessary to convey a true sense of life. For Henri, bright colors were anathema to realism; their presence reduced the sincerity of a painting. These were all lessons that greatly impressed Pène du Bois, and laid the true foundation for the work he went on to do in the next decade.

After finishing his studies with Henri in 1905, Pène du Bois accompanied his father Henri to Europe on an extended business trip (Henri Pène du Bois was an art and literature critic, who at that time was writing for the New York American). Their first stop was London, which Guy found somber and uninspiring. He was not much impressed with English art. But after several weeks in London, the pair traveled on to Paris, where Guy fell in love with the city and immediately felt at home within it. In Paris, Pène du Bois rented a studio on the left bank and immersed himself in the café life of artistic Paris. His father introduced him to the literary world of the city, and he also befriended American artists, including Alfred Maurer and Frederick Carl Frieseke.

Pène du Bois returned to the United States in 1906. Like many of the artists of “The Eight” Pène du Bois found work at a newspaper, the New York American. But unlike those other artists, who worked in illustration, Pène du Bois was hired as a general reporter, and subsequently wrote opera criticism at night.

The Circus Tent clearly shows the influence of Henri’s teaching. Pène du Bois’ palette is somber: a dark green suffuses the painting; the audience is mainly cast in black, punctuated by brighter—but muted— colors. Pène du Bois has painted his figures with quick, thick strokes. The faces of most figures are smudges of paint, with little to no facial detail. The bare knees of the children in front are a linear series of quick dabs of beige, their clothing obscured, excepting the occasional bow or ribbon.

The viewer looks upon this audience from on a diagonal. Pène du Bois frames the composition with three dark green tent sections with broad white strokes at top, a vertical pole at left, and the first row, half-filled with children, at bottom. There is only one face that Pène du Bois has detailed and it stands in high contrast to the others. Painted an ashen white with its mouth agape and resembling a skull, the androgynous figure is a threatening, pervasive presence in the work. Is it a ghost, a wraith or simply an aging, unhappy patron? It contributes to the somber mood and adds mystery to a painting whose subject is one usually associated with happiness and entertainment.