La Peau de l'Ours Collection. Six years later, it was sold at Hôtel Drouot and acquired by the Thannhauser Galleries in Munich. Sometime between November 1914 and June 1915, the canvas was bought by Hertha Koenig, and then to the Valentine Gallery in New York. In 1931, the artwork was sold to Chester Dale, who eventually gave it to the National Gallery of Art via bequest in 1963. References in other works Bohemian–Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was inspired by this painting as he wrote the fifth of ten elegies in his Duino Elegies (1923). Rilke used the figures in Picasso's painting as a symbol of "human activity ... always travelling and with no fixed abode, they are even a shade more fleeting than the rest of us, whose fleetingness was lamented." Further, although Picasso's painting depicts the figures in a desolate desert landscape, Rilke described them as standing on a "threadbare carpet" to suggest "the ultimate loneliness and isolation of Man in this incomprehensible world, practicing their profession from childhood to death as playthings of an unknown will...before their 'pure too-little; had passed into 'empty too-much'." See also The Actor Acrobat and Young Harlequin Famille d'acrobates avec singe Girl on a Ball References External links Family of Saltimbanques at the National Gallery of Art Paintings by Pablo Picasso Collections of the National Gallery of Art 1905 paintings Paintings of Montmartre Paintings of children Circus paintings