The grand spectacles of the circus and the racecourse fascinated Toulouse-Lautrec. He had been an avid rider as a youth, and horses on the track and in the ring were the subjects of many of his earliest drawings. He produced exhilarating paintings and prints of acrobats and jockeys intermittently in the 1870s and 1880s, and returned to these themes with renewed vigor during his last years. Toulouse-Lautrec made these late circus drawings entirely from memory, while he was institutionalized as a result of his struggles with alcohol and disease.
