Circus Clowns at Bullen's Circus
Watercolour
72 x 51 cm
Signed lower right
EXHIBITED
Jonathan Grant Galleries, Peter McIntyre Exhibition, 2009
LITTERATURE
McIntyre, Peter. (1962) The Painted Years. A.H & A.W Reed Ltd, Wellington.
ILLUSTRATED
(2009) Peter McIntyre [Exhibition Catalogue]. Auckland, New Zealand: Jonathan Grant Galleries.
“Moving down the coast where the villages and the people look like the earlier Gauguins, I came to Douarnenez where the sardine nets, hung from the mast, make a blue mist across the harbour in the evening sun. A small circus had arrived, splashing the grey blue scene with vermilion, and I thought as I sketched it that every time I had seen a circus I wanted to go with it. A man in soiled riding clothes came out of a red caravan and went across the square to the dearer café, so I guessed him to be the manager. I found a seat near him and, inviting him to join me in a drink, showed him my sketches of the circus. ‘Very good – very pretty,’ he said warily. ‘I don’t want to sell you drawings,’ I assured him. ‘I want to travel with your circus.’ ‘What can you do?’ he grunted. ‘You are not of the circus.’ He shrugged his shoulders in a gesture that ended the matter and opened up a newspaper. I had nothing to lose so as I sat I made another circus drawing from my head this time. I drew a trapeze act but left the tights off and quietly slipped it over to him. This time he roared with laughter and slapped his thigh. ‘Keep it,’ I said, and he called for drinks. ‘You can doss in with the roustabouts but you’ll have to help clearing up after the yaks.’
My companions, the roustabouts, resented me at first, but they slowly came round to a monosyllabic invitation to share a drink or a loaf that for them was graciousness. Except for the towns where we stayed two to three days, we played a village a day, travelling by night. I lived in a vacuum of tiredness, moving like a sleepwalker from one task to another, itching and dirty. Yet I was entirely happy. The circus, for all its hard physical realities, was so unreal a world, a ritual, an art form centuries old in a tinsel setting that enthralled me the more since nothing in it was familiar. It took me beyond the stolid suburbia of my upbringing.”
McIntyre, Peter. (1962) The Painted Years. A.H & A.W Reed Ltd, Wellington.
