‘Can you come Saturday morning to my studio, 19 bis rue Fontaine?’ Degas wrote to Edmond de Goncourt in 1879. ‘From 10.30 to half-past noon, I will have my négresse and her partner who will come expressly to be at your disposal.’
Not content with dangling from a rope by her teeth, she suspended a 300-kilo cannon barrel from her jaw
It’s not what it sounds like. The ‘négresse’ in question was Anna Albertine Olga Brown, stage name Miss La La, an aerialist at the Cirque Fernando who had been sitting – or more accurately hanging – in Degas’s studio for a painting for that year’s fourth Impressionist exhibition. As his friend was working on a circus novel, he thought he might be interested in meeting her. Degas was clearly proud of his catch: Miss La La was a celebrity. She and her partner Theophilia Szterker – stage name Miss Kaira – were ‘envied models for the painters of the neighbourhood’ according to L’Orchestre.
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