Rehearsal of the Pasdeloup Orchestra at the Cirque d’Hiver

Painted about 1879, when John Singer Sargent was a young painter fresh from Carolus-Duran’s atelier in Paris, Rehearsal of the Pasdeloup Orchestra shows the famous orchestra rehearsing inside the round arena of the Cirque d’Hiver, seen from above as a dark hive of players about the central floor. It is an astonishingly assured picture for a young artist — the massed violins and horns resolved into a continuous shimmer, the flat stands of the circus boxes ringing the oval like a colosseum, the whole scene unified by a dusky orange lamplight. Sargent, who had yet to make his name, here anticipates the century’s fascination with the city’s hidden interiors, and the picture already shows the bravura suggestion of forms through light that would define his mature style. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.