1/2/2024 0 Comments Arq pierrot![]() ![]() Behind him in the gloom, a poster advertising a masked ball is visible, while cluttered at the right of the canvas is a collection of empty wine bottles and a discarded top hat. The contrast between the two is instructive – Harlequin appears content with his newspaper while Pierrot stares sullenly into the smoke rising from his cigar. Thomas Couture (1815–1879) The Wallace Collection To Charles Baudelaire, the poet with whose name the most sinister elements of the Romantic imagination are synonymous, Pierrot appeared 'pale as the moon, mysterious as silence, supple and mute as the serpent', a figure who has been 'degraded by his misery and the ingratitude of the public, into whose booth the forgetful world no longer wants to enter'. It was accepted, particularly among the French avant-garde of the day who battled against public conservatism, that Pierrot was no ordinary clown. The two actors responded to the Romantic temperament of their time and recast Pierrot as an eerie and existentially minded character who swept across the stage with a silent, somnambulist grace.īy the mid-nineteenth century, it scarcely mattered what Watteau's intentions had been in painting Pierrot. Grimaldi was known for inventing a set piece revolving around the discovery of a skeleton which reportedly caused some performers to literally die of fright, while Deburau was acquitted of murder after felling a child with a single stroke of his walking cane in 1836. John Cawse (1779–1862) National Portrait Gallery, Londonīoth were strange, mercurial, and somewhat ghoulish figures in their own right. Simultaneously, Pierrot found a new lease of life on the French and British stages played by his greatest and most talented sponsors, Joey Grimaldi in London and Jean-Gaspard Deburau in Paris. ![]() The nineteenth century saw a wave of monographs written on Watteau, each one claiming (in an argument that has been consistently discredited by modern art historians) that the painter, depicting the revels of the sophisticated beau monde but standing essentially outside of it, identified with Pierrot as a symbolic analogue for the tragically estranged artist. ![]() The blank stare he offers his audience who came to see him fail, who came to laugh at the bawdy comedy, began to seem like an unexpected ally for a generation of artists and writers who increasingly viewed themselves as exemplary sufferers, at odds with an uncomprehending public. It is difficult, too, to separate the truth from the fiction owing to the revival of interest in his Pierrot paintings during the heyday of Romanticism, whose proponents found this strange clown's curious alienation irresistible. It is unclear why Watteau saw something of the great melancholy that would come to characterise his outlook. ![]()
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