[2] The nickname came from her most sensational trick: to fire a cannon suspended on chains that she held in her teeth while hanging from the trapeze, hooked at the knees.

Unlike his contemporaries like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Georges Seurat, the focus is not on the action within the ring or the crowd's reactions; the viewer sees the spectacle as the audience would have done, gazing up at the daring feat taking place above.

Some scholars have connected this pose to contemporary ethnographic photography, suggesting that the profile view turns the woman into "a representation of the race.

"[4] By painting her in the profile view, Degas is not portraying her as merely a performer, but a representative for the women of color and the working class.

She is hanging in the air, but the intersecting lines in the background form a web that helps secure her position in the composition.

[2] The point of view from below has been interpreted as a reversal of the publicly expected hierarchical relationship between the largely white audience and the mixed-race performer.

[4] Degas mainly used unsaturated orange and green with different shades of gray, which is consistent with the palette found in many of his other paintings of women.

Art historian Marilyn R. Brown argued that these changes could be a reflection of Degas's anxiety about his own racial identity.

However, Degas did not show her face to the audience, making the scene more like a genre painting, in which the identity of the subject cannot be firmly established.

Originally displayed in the Tate, it was transferred to the National Gallery in the 1950s along with masterpieces by Manet, Renoir, Seurat and Van Gogh, once they were no longer regarded as modern.