Harlequin

Harlequin (1889) at the Pola Museum of Art is among Cézanne's most striking figure subjects and belongs to a series of at least three harlequin paintings he made around this period. His son Paul modeled for the costume subject, which gave Cézanne access to a figure type whose geometric diamond-patterned costume aligned with his own formal concerns in an unusually direct way. The Commedia dell'Arte character had been a subject in French and Italian painting from Watteau through Daumier, and by the late nineteenth century harlequin carried Symbolist associations with the melancholy outsider-artist, the performer who conceals feeling behind costume. Cézanne's treatment is characteristically formal rather than psychological, but the scale of the composition — larger than most of his figure works — and the dramatic presence of the costume suggest an ambition to produce a major figure painting that would stand alongside the portrait traditions of the museums. The Pola Museum of Art near Tokyo, part of the Japanese institutional collecting of European modernism that began after the Second World War, holds this unusual canvas as its most significant Cézanne holding.

The harlequin's diamond-patterned costume allows Cézanne to apply his geometrizing vision to a figure that already expresses geometry — the triangular red, black, and white pattern of the costume rendered through his constructive stroke. His treatment of the figure's volume through accumulated directional marks creates a monumentality that transforms the theatrical character into an archetype. The palette combines the specific colors of the harlequin costume with the cool tones of the surrounding space.