Pierrot

Watteau made his name on small, delicate scenes of elegant people drifting through parks, so this picture is a genuine surprise. It is the only life-size figure he ever painted, a single actor in the loose white costume of Pierrot, the sad clown of the Italian comedy troupes then playing in Paris. He stands flat and frontal on a little mound, arms hanging useless at his sides, staring straight out at us while his fellow players carry on behind and below him, the doctor on his donkey, the lovers, the captain. Painted around 1718 or 1719, it was probably a signboard or a portrait tied to the theatre world Watteau loved. He was already ill with the tuberculosis that would kill him within a few years. The canvas dropped out of sight for a century, surfacing again only in the 1820s before it reached the Louvre.