Valencia
The clown, like the harlequins, were quite recurrent themes in painting from the 18th century onwards, but especially from the second half of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century. This painting dates from 1880, and the painter, permanently settled in Valencia, had to remember Rome and those costumes with which the artist friends and attendees of the often shared studio-workshops portrayed each other respectively. Realists liked to represent circus characters as a hyperbolic mirror of everyday life itself. Clown and dog trainer before going out on the track is a good example of this. A painting, signed and dated by Agrasot about the burlesque coach's drum, distantly related to Commedia dell'arte. A complete ironic redundancy about life, the real and the imaginary. Red dominates the centrality of the painting, highlighting the made-up character as a conative idea, and the rest of the figures and colors: poster of horses, janitor and audience, come together as environmental props in the comedian and his trained animals just before the performance begins.
