John Bill Ricketts

Ricketts' Circus Historical Marker at 12th and Market Sts. Philadelphia PA

John Bill Ricketts (1769–1802) was an English equestrian who brought the first modern circus to the United States.

Biography Ricketts began his theatrical career with the Royal Circus and Equestrian Philharmonic Academy, in London, in the 1780s. He emigrated from Britain, in 1792, to establish his first circus, in Philadelphia. There, he built “Ricketts' Art Pantheon and Amphitheatre”, 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. In 1797, Ricketts commemorated the retirement of his friend and fellow Freemason George Washington with a special performance. He soon performed for the president's successor, John Adams. On 5 September 1797 he established the first circus in Canada, in Montreal.

In December 1799, three days after the death of Washington, Eventually, Ricketts was able to recover some of his horses and property and even managed to perform some shows on Guadeloupe. He recovered his fortunes enough to charter a small, if unreliable, ship, intending to return to England; along the voyage, the ship sank, and all on board were lost. In 1879, George C. Mason published The Life and Works of Gilbert Stuart, in which he described the painting as "an unfinished picture, which, there is strong reason for believing, was painted by Stuart" and identified the subject as Breschard, the Circus Rider. It was under this title that the painting was displayed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1880. In 1942 the painting entered the collection of the National Gallery of Art, which changed the identification to "John Bill Ricketts" by 1947.