Pierrot, formerly known as Gilles
Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) · c. 1718-1719
A man in a white satin costume stands alone at the front of the canvas, arms hanging at his sides, feet together, hat pushed back, looking straight out at you with an expression that resists description. He is Pierrot, the mute and perpetually humiliated servant of the Italian comedy. Behind and below him four other players, Harlequin, the Doctor, a young woman and the Captain, are busy with their own scene, one of them tugging a donkey up the slope. Nobody is looking at Pierrot. He occupies the whole picture and belongs to none of it, which is the point.
Scale is the first thing to register: this is the only life-size single figure Watteau painted, and the satin suit fills the canvas like a wall. Watteau lavishes his finest handling on it, building creamy whites with grey-blue and warm pink shadows so that the fabric reads as light itself, and the trousers break at the ankle over pink-ribboned shoes. Nothing is idealised: the shoulders slope, the hands are inert, the face is soft and a little heavy. Later generations read it as Watteau's self-portrait or as an image of the artist exposed before the public, though the painting was probably made as a signboard or a portrait of an actor.
The canvas dropped out of sight during the eighteenth century and resurfaced in Paris in the early nineteenth, when a dealer is said to have inscribed a teasing invitation on it and sold it for a modest sum to Dominique Vivant Denon, Napoleon's museum director. Doctor Louis La Caze bought it in 1845 and left it to the Louvre in 1869 with the rest of his extraordinary collection.
Did You Know? Napoleon's museum director bought it for about 150 francs; the Louvre now treats it as one of the defining images of French painting.
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