Pierrot and Harlequin (Mardi Gras)
Paul Cézanne (1839 to 1906) · 1888
Two figures from the Italian comedy walk across a stage. Harlequin, in a tight suit of red and blue diamonds, strides forward with a stick under his arm and a hard, almost sullen face. Behind him Pierrot, in a baggy white costume, leans in and seems about to snatch his hat or whisper something. A heavy curtain hangs behind them. It is Mardi Gras, the last day of carnival before Lent, and the picture has the strange, tense mood that Cézanne brings to everything, even a joke.
The models were Cézanne's son Paul, sixteen years old, as Harlequin, and a friend of his, Louis Guillaume, as Pierrot. Look at the construction. The floor tips up, Harlequin's legs are impossibly long and his feet do not quite carry him, Pierrot's white costume is built of blue and grey planes like a sculpture. Cézanne painted every surface in small parallel strokes and left the drawing visible where he changed his mind. He was not interested in the story of the carnival but in how a red diamond pattern could be made to turn in space, and how two bodies could lock into a single design.
He painted it in Paris in the winter of 1888, one of the rare occasions he worked on a large figure composition of this kind. Sergei Shchukin bought it in 1904 from the dealer Ambroise Vollard, and it hung in his Moscow house among eight Cézannes. After the revolution it went to the Museum of New Western Art and then, in 1948, to the Pushkin. Notice the young Paul's expression, which his father described as the look of a boy who had not wanted to pose.
Did You Know? Cézanne's son Paul complained of the long sittings, and one of the preparatory studies shows him with a sulky face that the artist kept in the final picture.
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