A circus is a company of performers who put on diverse entertainment shows that may include clowns, acrobats, trained animals, trapeze acts, musicians, dancers, hoopers, tightrope walkers, jugglers, magicians, ventriloquists, and unicyclists as well as other object manipulation and stunt-oriented artists. The term circus also describes the field of performance, training and community which has followed various formats through its 250-year modern history. Although not the inventor of the medium, Newcastle-under-Lyme born Philip Astley is credited as the father of the modern circus.
Events from the year 1809 in literature.
Gilbert Stuart was an American painter born in the Rhode Island Colony who is widely considered one of America's foremost portraitists. His best-known work is an unfinished portrait of George Washington, begun in 1796, which is usually referred to as the Athenaeum Portrait. Stuart retained the original and used it to paint scores of copies that were commissioned by patrons in America and abroad. The image of George Washington featured in the painting has appeared on the United States one-dollar bill for more than a century and on various postage stamps of the 19th century and early 20th century.
Thomas Sully was an American portrait painter in the United States. Born in Great Britain, he lived most of his life in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He painted in the style of Thomas Lawrence. His subjects included national political leaders such as United States presidents: Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson, Revolutionary War hero General Marquis de Lafayette, and many leading musicians and composers. In addition to portraits of wealthy patrons, he painted landscapes and historical pieces such as the 1819 The Passage of the Delaware. His work was adapted for use on United States coinage.
Théodore Chassériau was a Dominican-born French Romantic painter noted for his portraits, historical and religious paintings, allegorical murals, and Orientalist images inspired by his travels to Algeria. Early in his career he painted in a Neoclassical style close to that of his teacher Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, but in his later works he was strongly influenced by the Romantic style of Eugène Delacroix. He was a prolific draftsman, and made a suite of prints to illustrate Shakespeare's Othello. The portrait he painted at the age of 15 of Prosper Marilhat makes Chassériau the youngest painter exhibited at the Louvre museum.
Circus clowns are a sub-genre of clowns. They typically perform at circuses and are meant to amuse, entertain and make guests laugh.
The Lansdowne portrait is an iconic life-size portrait of George Washington painted by Gilbert Stuart in 1796. It depicts the 64-year-old president of the United States during his final year in office. The portrait was a gift to former British Prime Minister William Petty, 1st Marquess of Lansdowne, and spent more than 170 years in England.
Walnut Street Theatre, founded in 1809 at 825 Walnut Street, on the corner of S. 9th Street in the Washington Square West neighborhood of Philadelphia, is the oldest operating theatre in the United States.
The equestrian theatre company of Pépin and Breschard, American Victor Pépin and Frenchman Jean Baptiste Casmiere Breschard, arrived in the United States from Madrid, Spain, in November 1807. They toured that new country until 1815. From their arrival until the present day, what is now known as the traditional circus has had a presence in North America.
The Palace of Sans-Souci, or Sans-Souci Palace, was the principal royal residence of Henry I, King of Haiti, better known as Henri Christophe. It is located in the town of Milot, approximately five kilometres (3 mi) northeast of the Citadelle Laferrière, and thirteen kilometres (8 mi) southwest of the Three Bays Protected Area. Being among the first buildings constructed in a free Haiti after the Haitian Revolution, the Palace and the neighboring Citadelle, are Haitian icons and global symbols of liberty, and were inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1982.
John Bill Ricketts (1769–1802) was an English equestrian who brought the first modern circus to the United States.
John Durang was the first native-born American to become known as a dancer.
Jean Baptiste Fontaine, né Le Sueur, was a French actor and theatre director. He was director of the theatre Comédie du Cap in Cap-Francais and an actor and newspaper editor in New Orleans. He was known under his stage name Fontaine.
Victor Adolphus Pépin was an American circus performer and circus owner most famous for being a partner in the Circus of Pépin and Breschard. The Circus of Pépin and Breschard can thus be considered the first American circus and Pépin the first American circus impresario.
Haitian literature has been closely intertwined with the political life of Haiti. Haitian intellectuals turned successively or simultaneously to African traditions, France, Latin America, the UK, and the United States. At the same time, Haitian history has always been a rich source of inspiration for literature, with its heroes, its upheavals, its cruelties and its rites.
Peter Grain was a French-American artist who achieved success in the United States. Known for his panoramas, landscapes, portraits, dioramas, portrait miniatures, and theatrical designs, he was also an architect and the author of at least one stage play. His family was involved in theatrical design in New York, Philadelphia and other major American cities for at least two generations.
Robert Field (1769–1819) was a painter who was born in London and died in Kingston, Jamaica. According to art historian Daphne Foskett, author of A Dictionary of British Miniature Painters (1972), Field was "one of the best American miniaturists of his time." During Field's time in Nova Scotia at the beginning of the nineteenth century, he was the most professionally trained painter in present-day Canada. He worked in the conventional neo-classic portrait style of Henry Raeburn and Gilbert Stuart. His most famous works are two groups of miniatures of George Washington, commissioned by his wife Martha Washington.
Comédie du Cap was a theater in Cap-Français in Saint-Domingue, active from 1740 to 1793; from 1764 as a public theater. It is regarded as a prototype for the theaters in Saint-Domingue, were theater were immensely popular.
The Anthony Street Theatre was an early New York City theatre which operated intermittently from 1812 to 1821. It opened as the Olympic Theatre in May 1812 and had multiple names during its brief existence.
