Mardi Gras

Cézanne painted this carnival scene around 1888, in Paris, and the two performers in it were not hired models. The Harlequin, upright in the sharp red and black diamonds, is the painter's own son Paul, then in his mid teens. The Pierrot slouching behind him in loose white is Paul's friend Louis Guillaume. These are the stock characters of the old Italian comedy, the sly one and the sad one, and Cézanne poses them not for a laugh but as a study in solid, sculpted form. The picture later ran through some of the great collections of modern painting. It belonged to Sergei Shchukin in Moscow, was taken by the state after the Russian revolution, and after decades of moving between museums it settled at the Pushkin Museum.