Success depended on astonishing the audience, and this the circuses did by exhibiting curiosities such as midgets, giants, and mermaids; training animals to perform tricks -such as elephants riding cycles; and inventing new and more ingenious acrobatic acts, demanding faultless timing and relentless physical
training on the part of the circusperformers.

One act, which achieved tremendous notoriety in London after its first performance at Astley's Amphitheater in 1864, was Mazeppa's Ride. A woman bareback rider named Adah Menken was strapped, supposedly naked (but in fact clothed in what now seems a quite decorous tunic), on the back of a "wild" horse, which would then rear and gallop around the stage. The act had been performed for years, but never before by a woman.

It was the start of a new and immensely popular circus tradition of young female performers which
introduced a risqué, slightly titillating aspect to the circus spectacular. Menken's daring ride was surpassed in 1877 when the young Madame Zazel (a girl from Leicester) was stuffed down the barrel of a cannon - actually a spring-loaded catapult - and fired high above the audience at West's Amphitheater in London. For each performance as a human cannonball, Madame Zazel received the then princely sum of L20, and retired with her fortune two years later.

The Amateur Circus, by James Tissot

The circus was so popular with all classes of society that wealthy amateurs produced their own shows. This painting, by Tissot shows two trapeze artists.

Artists at the Circus

In France, as in England, the circuses vied with music-hall and cabaret as the most popular entertainment in the last decades of the century. Their success was such that in Paris there were five permanent circuses in the 1870s, each giving nightly performances. But the audiences they attracted were different from those in London, for these "lowbrow" entertainments became a magnet for the artists and writers of the time. Circus acts and individual performers were celebrated not just in the handbills and posters used for publicity, but in paintings that have since become world famous.

Painters and poets were attracted in particular to the Cirque Fernando in Montmartre, which opened in 1875. Being small, it had an intimacy not found in the larger Parisian circuses - certainly not in the rival Hippodrome, which was large enough to stage chariot races by the 1890s.

Performances at the Cirque Fernando were held at 8:30 each night in a circular wooden building, its high domed roof criss-crossed with brightly painted and gilded rafters. Seats rose steeply from the ring, allowing the audience a far greater sense of involvement and immediacy than in the huge big tops popular abroad. Every movement, every hesitation almost, could be seen.

The notorious Menken had performed Mazeppa's Ride here, and the circus still relied heavily on female horse-riding acts, controlled (as tradition demanded) by a mustachioed ringmaster, banishing his whip. These female equestriennes would perform dance movements and somersaults bareback on a horse as it cantered around the ring. One, who doubled as a clown and also worked at the Moulin Rouge, was the curiously-named Cha-U-Kao who, along with the popular clowns Footit and Chocolat, was sketched and painted by Toulouse-Lautrec.

Unusual Feats

Daredevil feats were much in demand as always. A mulatto woman, Miss La La, helped to make the Cirque Fernando famous by an act in which, hanging by her teeth from a small iron ring, she would be hauled up to a high trapeze. By the 1880s and 90s young women had replaced men in many trapeze acts, sometimes performing without safety nets as an added thrill for the audience. Their graceful and perfectly timed movements, inspired paintings by both Lautrec and Degas.

The Fernando was eventually renamed the Cirque Medrano, and moved to new premises, but its popularity as an artists' hunt lasted right into the 20th century. Picasso painted the acrobats and clowns he saw there and the writer Jean Cocteau was a frequent visitor. But although the circus put on shows right up to the 1950s, it declined in popularity after the first two decades of this century, overtaken by a new entertainment - the cinema.

Blondin

Leotard's success was soon eclipsed by that of Blondin, who in 1861 walked along a tightrope stretched 160 feet above Niagara Falls, carrying a man on his back and pausing in the middle to cook and eat an omelet. Blondin subsequently played to packed audiences at the Crystal Palace, where he would ascend to a great height by walking up a tightrope at a steep angle and performing various tricks once he reached the horizontal rope.

In terms of pure spectacle, little could rival Phineas T. Barnum's American Circus, performed in a huge, circular canvas tent which came to be know as the Big Top. Barnum was the first to dub his circus the "Greatest Show on Earth" (now used by practically all circuses, however small) and in sheer size it certainly outstripped all its European counterparts.

Barnum's circus, which was opened in Brooklyn in 1871 and afterwards traveled to England, claimed to have 4,000 employees, performers and animals, with 32 acres of canvas, using three tons of sawdust at every venue.

The Eldorado Elf

The success of Barnum's gigantic show rested to a great extent on his own showmanship and skill at publicity. Among the attractions his circus boasted were exhibits that now seem altogether tasteless, but which Barnum knew the public would be agog to see, including Anna Leake, the Armless Woman; a troupe of "man-eating cannibals" brought from Fiji, Admiral Dot, the Eldorado Elf; and Colonel Goshen, the Palestinian Giant. These were in addition to a large equestrian team, acrobats, conjurers, performing animals, an exotic menagerie, a waxworks and a full band.

Freaks - some of them genuine, but others depending on a large dose of gullibility and a certain physical distance on the part of the spectators - had been part of fairs for centuries and were still immensely popular. Barnum's world-famous circus - expanded in 1891 when he formed a partnership with James A. Bailey - exploited their appeal to the full. And Barnum & Bailey's Circus remained a byword in show business history long after both founders had died, at the turn of the 20th century.