Caroline Loyo

Caroline Loyo at Niblo's Theater in 1851

Caroline Loyo (* around 1816; † 1892 in Paris or 1895 in Bléré ) was a French school rider. She is considered the first high school rider in the circus .

Life

Little is known about Caroline Loyo's family background. According to Baron de Vaux, she left her family and came to Paris with a single horse of her own to perform in the circus. She was a student of Jules Charles Pellier , where her horses - a school rider always had to own at least three - stood and trained.

Around 1833 she made her debut at the age of seventeen at the Cirque Olympique on Boulevard du Temple in Paris and caused a sensation in society. After this first appearance, she continued her training with François Baucher . In the beginning she had ridden horses that had been trained by someone else's hand, but she soon took on this task herself. She moved from Cirque Olympique to Adolphe Franconi's Cirque des Champs-Élysées , where she alternated with Baucher until 1845. Since the high school had previously been a male domain, their performances repeatedly astonished the audience.

The importance of the circus in society in those years and the public's interest in Caroline Loyo emerges from an anecdote according to which one wealthy gentleman was reprimanded by another for visiting the Palazzo Pitti in Florence instead of the performance Loyos to attend with a new horse.

Caroline Loyo had the reputation of being able to make any stubborn horse docile. When the ringmaster Louis Déjean put her to the test and gave her a horse named Mahmoud, which was considered to be extraordinarily unruly, she proved her skills. However, she subsequently spurned this mount because it had become too boring for her after the dressage.

After appearances in Germany and England, Loyo returned to France around 1846 and continued her career there. In 1852 she married the circus director François Loisset , a son of the horse expert Baptiste Loisset , but apparently continued to perform under her maiden name. In 1855 she could be seen in Berlin with Omar Kingsley , who used to appear as a woman.

François Loisset died in Stockholm in 1878 or 1879 . After that, his widow lived in seclusion in the village of Bléré near Tours . From 1881 she was penniless.

It is possible that Caroline Loyo, who also rode outside of the circus performances and took part in improvised horse races, was captured in a painting by Alfred de Dreux . The Harvard University Library has a collection of circus pictures, including two depictions of Caroline Loyo, as well as pictures of members of the Loisset family.

literature

• Stephanie Haerdle, do n't be afraid, that's our job! Art riders, trainers and other circus artists , Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-932338-29-8 , pp. 31–34

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The place of death Paris is given on data.bnf.fr , but not in Haerdle. Reference is made here to the Dictionnaire des Femmes Célèbres , according to which Caroline Gertrude Loyo was born in Moselle in 1816 and only died in Bléré in 1895.
2. ^ Susanna Hedenberg and Gertrud Pfister, Écuyères and "doing gender". Presenting Feminity in a Male Domain - Female Circus Riders 1800–1920 , in: Scandinavian Sport Studies Forum 3, 2012, pp. 25–47, here p. 28 f. ( Digitized version )
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Richard Hooper, Those Daring Young Women And Their Fabulous Feats , April 13, 2014 at www.leesburgtoday.com ( Memento of the original from April 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked . Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ Urban monument and equestrian benchmarks on cheval.culture.fr
5. ^ David Bradby, Louis James, Bernard Sharratt: Performance and Politics in Popular Drama: Aspects of Popular Entertainment in Theater, Film and Television, 1800-1976 . Cambridge University Press, September 3, 1981, ISBN 978-0-521-28524-7 , p. 116.
6. ↑ Circus Images on oasis.lib.harvard.edu ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.