Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando, 1879 Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas (1834-1917)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

The first sensation is vertigo. Against a vault of burnished terracotta, a solitary acrobat ascends, her body taut as the rope that draws her skyward. Seen from below, she appears both monumental and elusive - torso twisted, one arm flung upward in a gesture of improbable grace, the other loosened for balance. The leather mouthpiece clenched between her teeth serves as the invisible anchor of this precarious flight, while sequined bodice and frilled shorts catch the stray gleam of gas-lit windows in the Cirque Fernando.

Degas drenches the scene in an unexpected orchestration of colour. The ceiling’s saturated orange simmers with heat, mirroring the charged atmosphere of performance. Cool celadon greens articulate the iron girders, their geometry slicing decisive diagonals that cradle the figure in a lattice of engineered space. The friction of these complementary hues generates a chromatic vibration that propels the eye upward. Within this duet, the aerialist’s muted lilac costume and warm brown skin attain a luminous neutrality - at once assimilated into the structure and insistently alive.

Technically, the canvas embodies Degas’s fusion of empirical observation and restless experiment. Pigment is scrubbed into the weave, the touch alternating between dry chalkiness and supple impasto, producing veils of translucence that hint at the dusty glare of gaslight. Outlines harden then dissolve, as though movement itself were fraying the edges of form. Barely suppressed graphite scaffolding testifies to the meticulous plotting required for such radical foreshortening. A single vertical flick defines the rope, mooring the whirl of limbs and lattice to the picture plane.

Compositionally, the performer is thrust to the upper fringe, a daring displacement that converts architecture into protagonist. The aerialist becomes a living accent mark in an airborne treatise on space - an echo of the Baroque ceiling frescoes Degas studied in Italy, yet recalibrated for Parisian modernity. Painted in 1879, amid a metropolis enthralled by spectacle, the work extends Impressionist preoccupations with contemporary life while rejecting the flicker of plein-air light for the artificial glow of interior drama. In elevating Miss La La literally and metaphorically, Degas captures not only an athletic feat but the fragile tension between human agility and the engineered environments of an industrial age.