Pierrot Content

This painting Pierrot Content, around 1712, in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, depicts the commedia dell'arte character in a rare moment of satisfaction. Pierrot, the melancholic clown, was Watteau's alter ego—an outsider observing the dramas of love and society with wistful detachment. Watteau drew deeply on commedia dell'arte traditions he observed in Paris and Valenciennes, giving his theatrical figures a melancholy underpinned by his own awareness of early death from tuberculosis. His Pier...

The white-clad Pierrot stands amid a group of theatrical characters, his loose white costume creating a luminous center. Watteau's sensitive rendering of the character's expression balances contentment with the underlying sadness that defines the figure.