Mardi Gras

Mardi Gras (c.1888) at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts is one of Cézanne's rare forays into theatrical subject matter — the costumed Harlequin and Pierrot figures painted in his Paris studio using his son Paul and a friend as models. Commedia dell'arte subjects were relatively common in French nineteenth-century painting, having been revived through Watteau's fêtes galantes tradition and maintained through the century's engagement with theatrical and popular performance. But Cézanne's approach is characteristically structural rather than atmospheric or narrative: the diamond-patterned Harlequin costume is a formal challenge, a geometric pattern that must coexist with the three-dimensional form of the body beneath it. The Pushkin's holding of this unusual Cézanne connects it to the great Russian collection that also includes his more typical landscapes and still lifes, allowing Soviet and post-Soviet viewers to experience the full range of his subject matter. Paul Cézanne fils appears as Harlequin, making this one of the few paintings in which father and son are directly connected within the work.

The Harlequin's diamond-patterned costume — red, black, and white lozenges — creates a strong geometric pattern that Cézanne uses to structure the canvas. The adjacent Pierrot in white provides a tonal anchor. The two figures are built with the same structural method as his card players — solid forms in shallow space, the interaction between their postures creating compositional tension. The floor's perspective is deliberately compressed.