Arlecchino

In late 1888 Cezanne had moved back to Paris, where the winter Carnival still filled the streets, and he set his teenage son Paul in a harlequin's diamond-patterned costume. He painted him more than once. In the larger Mardi Gras scene the boy's face is tender and particular. Here it has hardened into something closer to a mask, the features flattened and still, the body tilted on its long legs against a bare ground. Cezanne cared less about the festival than about the costume as a problem of shape and colour. The wooden baton in the boy's hand points down at nothing, holding the pose as steady as the painter needed it.