Arts & antiques
When Miss La La hoisted herself to the top of the circus tent by a rope clenched in her jaws, she dazzled not only crowds across France and Britain, but also Edgar Degas
MISS LA LA floated high above the crowd, the golden frills of her costume shining as she twirled upwards. Her arms pierced the air either side of her body, her legs bent at the knee. Only her teeth, clenching a leather piece at the end of the rope that hung from the top of the circus tent, kept her from plunging to almost certain death.
Craning his neck to soak up every detail was artist Edgar Degas, who would later capture the scene in a painting, Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando, now at the National Gallery.
Although the Impressionist is best known for his ballerinas, Miss La La, whose real name was Anna Albertine Olga Brown, was no less of an inspiration to him, as he brought her Iron Jaw act to canvas. The aerialist was born in Szczecin, Prussia (now Poland), in 1858, to a Prussian mother and an African-American father, although, to entice the public, she was sometimes presented as an African princess or even a queen.
She was only nine when she began performing as a trapeze artist and 20 when Degas watched her at the Cirque Fernando, close to his Montmartre studio, for four nights in January 1879. Shortly afterwards, Miss La La went on a tour of Britain, appearing at the Royal Aquarium in March 1879 and, later, the Gaiety in Manchester. Her feats— she spun a man by the belt she held in her mouth, before lifting with her teeth a 150lb brass cannon, to which she hung on even after it was fired mid air—wowed the British
public. On March 15, 1879, The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News named her the latest acrobatic sensation, marvelling at ‘a maxillary power unexampled since the days of Samson’. Her biceps were not to be sniffed at, either, at more than 15in, much to the envy of Edmond Desbonnet, founder of one of France’s early bodybuilding magazines, who praised Miss La La’s ‘superb arms’ in his book on strongmen, Les Rois de la Force.
A MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN
UPDATING antique furniture requires careful thought, particularly when it comes to upholstery. For antiques dealer William Green of family business Ron Green (www. rongreen.co.uk), this means picking ‘a fabric that feels as if it has always been a part’ of the furniture, as with this late-19th-century chair from the Aesthetic Movement, which has Japanese and Far East Asian influences. ‘I chose Rendlesham in Cognac by Guy Goodfellow,’ he explains.
‘Although inspired by a 19th-century French document, it feels as if it has an element of [Far East] inspiration, similar to Japanese fashions of the late 19th century. The contrast between the light g
