John Bill Ricketts

There, he built “Ricketts' Art Pantheon and Amphitheatre”,[1] a circus building, in the fall of 1792, in which he conducted a riding school.

After training a group of Pennsylvania horses, on April 3, 1793, he gave America's first complete circus performance, which began a series of exhibitions two to three times a week.

Ricketts sailed to the West Indies on the schooner Sally, but the ship was intercepted by a French privateer and taken to the island of Guadeloupe.

The painting's current provenance includes the sitter's brother, Francis Ricketts; it was later owned by Peter Grain and George Washington Riggs.

[8] In 1942 the painting entered the collection of the National Gallery of Art, which changed the identification to "John Bill Ricketts" by 1947.