American Art Collaborative

With resplendent sunlight sprinkling their tattered hat brims and bonnets, the boys and girls in Watching the Circus inhabit a portrait-idyll of country childhood. Perched on, draped over, and leaning against a dilapidated fence, these children have congregated in the yard behind what is likely their schoolhouse, a familiar emblem of childhood, immortalized in Winslow Homer’s Snap the Whip of 1872.[1] Complete with red clapboard and a smoking chimney that suggests school is in session, the schoolhouse has been abandoned by its pupils. The children’s interests lie elsewhere on this day. In imposing unison, their 13 sets of eyes gaze directly forward into the space just beyond John George Brown’s picture plane.Brown immigrated to the United States from England at the age of 22 and became one of the most successful American artists of the late 19th century. He spent the majority of his life in New York City painting picturesque images of children that brought many collectors to the doorstep of his Tenth Street studio. While barefoot country boys and sun-bonneted girls occupied his early paintings, Brown gradually shifted away from these subjects following the Civil War. Watching the Circus is one of the few country scenes that he painted after 1880. The public’s growing interest in the industrialized city, with its colorful characters and new mysteries, led Brown to focus his attentions on street urchins, newsboys, and the noble bootblacks for which he is best known. These city “types” represented the impact of industrialization and urbanization on America’s youth and increasingly were recognized as fixtures of the urban landscape.Though undeniably a country scene, Watching the Circus also refers, if only in its title, to a feature of the industrializing nation: the traveling circus. The 1880s was a boom decade for the circus in America, as companies big and small utilized the ever-expanding railroad system for their travels. In particular, 1881 saw the high-profile merger of P.T. Barnum’s “Greatest Show on Earth” with Cooper, Bailey & Company into the famed Barnum & Bailey Circus.Brown painted a number of scenes like Watching the Circus in which groups of children react to something outside the picture. The most closely related work, Watching the Train, also painted in 1881, shows a group of seven girls in a nearly identical setting and composition. Brown’s title makes the appearance of the train in the countryside a significant subject of the painting by entrusting it to the viewer’s imagination.In Watching the Circus, it is presumably the arrival of the circus that has drawn these boys and girls to the rickety old fence behind their schoolhouse. The picture of that grand spectacle takes shape in our minds, and we look into the children’s faces for cues. But their calm and reticent expressions hardly seem those of a circus or parade audience. The boy in the center crosses his arms indifferently, while others fold their hands over the fence or on their laps. A few show subtle smiles. Most tilt their heads and gaze fixedly at what seems to be a more subdued sort of spectacle. Brown’s allusive title engages the viewer in a lighthearted pun. As the marvelous, colorful circus in our imagination dissolves, we are left puzzling over this placid sea of faces. Has not the spectator become the spectacle?Hannah Blunt1. Winslow Homer’s canvas of Snap the Whip, 1872, is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. John George Brown’s Watching the Train, 1881, is in a private collection.