Gilles (painting)

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Pierrot, called Gilles (Antoine Watteau)
Pierrot, called Gilles
Antoine Watteau , around 1718/19
Oil on canvas
184.5 x 149 cm
Louvre , Paris

Pierrot, called Gilles (French title: Pierrot, dit autrefois Gilles ) is the title of a painting by the French painter Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), which was created around 1718/1719. It shows the clown Pierrot from the Italian Commedia dell'arte , who stands in front of the other rather cheerful members of his group of actors with a sad, melancholy expression on his face. The picture is located in the Louvre in Paris , in the Sully building complex , on the second floor, in room 36.

Image content

The portrait format painting has the dimensions 184.5 × 149 cm and is executed using the oil on canvas technique.

It shows a man standing in an upright lonely pose in a Pierrot costume, as if in a straitjacket, in front of a background consisting of painted cedars, pines and bushes and probably representing a theater backdrop. At the right edge of the picture is a herm with the face of a faun . The figure stands on a stage-like platform so that the people in the background and a donkey can only be seen above the chest. Gilles , the Pierrot, stands there as if rooted to the spot, with hanging arms and a melancholy, somewhat helpless look, while his fellow actors are uninterested in him and more vital, apparently belonging to another sphere and only looking at the donkey. In these figures, some well-known figures from the Commedia dell'arte can be recognized, the dottore , here without a mask, riding the donkey and looking at the viewer with a mischievous smile, Leandro , Isabella and Il Capitano . The donkey's gaze, with one eye that is as dark as Gilles' eyes, looks intense and serious on the viewer.

Attempts at interpretation

Les Comédiens italiens (around 1720)
Pierrot content (around 1712)

Watteau dealt with the subject of theater comedians and their environment for a long time and created numerous drawings and paintings that show actors and scenes from the world of theater. His painting Les Comédiens italiens (around 1720) in particular shows a related scene, but with a rather cheerful-looking Gilles. There are also preliminary drawings for the face of this figure. But the older, more enigmatic picture repeatedly stimulated art historians, but also cultural workers, to decipher and interpret the picture. Marcel Carné was inspired by him for his film Children of Olympus , but Pablo Picasso and Henri Rousseau also used the motif of Gilles in their work. Another oil painting related to this topic is Pierrot content ( satisfied Pierrot ), on which this figure can also be seen, surrounded by four other people. This probably dates from 1712 and is in the Museo de arte Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid.

There have been countless attempts to fathom the history of the picture, but they have failed. To this day, research knows nothing about the client, the circumstances of the creation, the origin and the artistic intentions of Watteau. It was not mentioned anywhere until 1826. Therefore, in this case, art history relies on speculation.

Art historian and Watteau connoisseur Donald Posner writes that Watteau intended a comparison between the funny figure of Pierrot and the worried person behind it. The cultural sociologist Richard Faber sees in the representation of Gilles in the picture from 1720 a variant of the motif Ecce homo : The comedians who surround him could say and point to him: ( Joh 19,5  EU ) See this fool, people, (comedians -) King! .

Wolfgang Hildesheimer sees the image the Pierrot or Gilles as victims each viewer . The characters in the background don't care about him, their rather serious attention is exclusively given to the donkey. Similar to the English art psychologist Andrew Marbot (1801-1830) invented by him from his novel Marbot. He finds it difficult to avoid an interpretation of a biography which , in a romantic and emotional overload, sees Pierrot as a melancholy clown.

History and provenance

The provenance of the work is not fully documented, because little is known about the whereabouts of the picture in the 18th century. But it seems that the Pierrot picture was well known to some of the theater artists of the time. In 1799, Gilles was featured as an engraving on an advertising slip for a theater. The journalist Jonathan Jones writes in the British newspaper The Guardian that the picture was perhaps intended as a shop sign for a café belonging to a Greek actor from Zante named Belloni , who was famous in Paris for his portrayals of Pierrot, but the identity of the Gilles is unknown. He refers to the Watteau expert Hélène Adhémar that in 1951 an indication of the brothers Claude and François Parfaict (French theater historian of the 18th century) in their work Histoire du Théâtre français générale depuis son origine jusqu'à présent, 1734-1749 found Has. However, it could also have been the coffee house owner Belloni himself, a friend of the painter, whom Watteau portrayed in the costume of Gilles, as the art historian Pierre Rosenberg notes in the Watteau 1684–1721 1985 Berlin exhibition catalog . This assumption is also supported by the curators of the collection in the Louvre, where it is even suspected that the person depicted could also be a kind of self-portrait of Antoine Watteau, in which he describes himself as an “amuseur triste” (“sadder Entertainer ”).

Today, however, it has been proven that the Gilles was bought by the Napoleonic cultural politician and museum director Dominique-Vivant Denon at the time of the French Empire and was first mentioned as part of his collection in 1826. The initially controversial dating of the work between 1718 and 1721 (Watteau's year of death) now seems to have been fixed by research to the year 1718 or 1719. However, it is unknown who Denon bought it from. After his death, it was auctioned to his nephew Brunel Denon, then to a Marquis de Cypierre, then to the collection of Louis La Caze, who considered it his favorite picture and gave it to the Louvre in 1869 together with his collection (Pierre Rosenberg im Exhibition catalog Berlin 1985).

literature

  • Dora Mosse Panofsky: Gilles or Pierrot? Iconographic notes on Watteau . In: Gazette des beaux-arts . No. 39 , January 1952, ISSN  0016-5530 , p. 319-340 .
  • Donald Posner: Antoine Watteau. Cornell University Press, 1984, ISBN 0-8014-1571-3 .
  • Andreas Strobl: Munich: The tragicomic Pierrot in art: melancholy and mask . In: Berliner Zeitung . October 10, 1995 ( online ).
  • Alain Viala: Inventer Watteau . tape 82 , no. 3 , 2013, ISBN 978-2-200-92859-9 , ISSN  2260-8478 , p. 27-37 ( cairn.info [PDF]).

Web links

Commons : Gilles (paintings)  - Collection of images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Pierrot, dit autrefois "Gilles". In: louvre.fr. Musée du Louvre - Paris, accessed August 29, 2015 (French).
  2. ↑ Eugenia Alonso: Watteau's Vision of the Commedia dell'Arte. El Museo de arte Thyssen-Bornemisza, archived from the original on November 21, 2015 ; accessed on August 29, 2015 .
  3. ^ Donald Posner: Antoine Watteau. Cornell University Press, 1984, ISBN 0-8014-1571-3 , pp. 269 ff.
  4. ↑ Richard Faber, Volkhard Krech (ed.): Art and religion: studies on cultural sociology and cultural history. Königshausen and Neumann 1999, p. 36 ff.
  5. ↑ Wolfgang Hildesheimer in Fritz J. Raddatz (ed.): ZEIT-Museum der 100 Bilder. Authors and artists about their favorite work of art. Insel-Verlag 1989, ISBN 3-458-32913-7 , p. 26 f.
  6. ↑ Jonathan Jones: Gilles, Jean-Antoine Watteau (c1718-19) . In: The Guardian . May 17, 2003 ( online ).
  7. ^ Margaret Grasselli, Pierre Rosenberg and Nicole Parmantier: Watteau 1684–1721. Exhibition catalog Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-87584-144-1 , p. 430 ff.