Description
Mardi Gras – Pierrot and Harlequin
Mardi Gras is one of the few works by Cézanne to use the carnival figures of the commedia dell’arte: Pierrot in white and Harlequin in red-and-black diamonds step through a curtain as though they had just walked onto a stage. The canvas is held by the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Our hand-painted reproduction on canvas brings this unusual, theatrical subject into your home, painted in oil on canvas.
The models were the painter’s son and his friend
Harlequin was posed for by Cézanne’s son Paul, and Pierrot by his friend Louis Guillaume. The painter therefore portrayed no professional actors but two young men in costume – which gives the scene an unusual gravity: nobody is laughing, nobody is playing to an audience.
Why the steps come out awkward
Harlequin’s leg is oddly long and Pierrot’s stance leans a little forward. This is not clumsiness: Cézanne built the figures out of planes and adjusted them to the balance of the whole composition rather than to anatomy. Decisions of exactly this kind made him a difficult painter for his contemporaries and a starting point for the next generation.
What you see on the canvas
The scene is closed in between two heavy drapes, and the floor rises towards the viewer so that the figures seem to be stepping down out of the painting. The original is painted in oil on canvas and was made in 1888; it is held by the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, which records it at 102 × 81 cm.
Why Mardi Gras is in Moscow
Mardi Gras is held by the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, and that address has a history of its own. Cézanne’s canvases entered Russian public collections from two private Moscow collections, the Shchukin and the Morozov, which the state nationalised at the end of 1918. When the joint museum of those collections was abolished in 1948, curators divided the works between two institutions – the bolder pieces generally went to the Hermitage and the rest to the Pushkin Museum. By some accounts the division was also an attempt to save the collection from destruction.
Mardi Gras on canvas
Harlequin’s red is a colour print almost never gets right – which is why this is not a print but a genuine hand-painted painting on canvas. We paint it especially for you, in ten sizes or to your own measurements if you have a particular wall in mind. A thin dark frame suits the upright format well; which one to choose is easiest to see with our 3D preview. Among our hand-painted oil reproductions you will also find Cézanne’s other figures and portraits: Boy in a Red Waistcoat, The Card Players (Metropolitan) and Boy with Skull.
- Subject: Mardi Gras (Fastnacht), Paul Cézanne, 1888, Pushkin Museum, Moscow
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 10 formats, stretched on a wooden stretcher frame on request, or made to your measurements
- Fact: Harlequin was posed for by the painter’s son Paul, and Pierrot by his friend Louis Guillaume
