Pierrot Catching a Fly

Philippe Mercier · 1740–50

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

58.6 × 74 cm (23 1/16 × 29 1/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Rococo

Pierrot Catching a Fly captures the melancholy comedy of commedia dell'arte with a delicacy rare in mid-eighteenth-century genre painting — a costumed figure absorbed in a quietly absurd task, the surrounding space charged with stillness. Philippe Mercier was a French-born painter who trained in Berlin and Paris before settling in England, where he introduced the fête galante sensibility of Watteau to British collectors. His theatrical subjects blend gentle satire with genuine sympathy, and his handling of the white Pierrot costume is a study in restraint — soft modulations of light across fabric that refuse to become showy. The figure never mugs; the comedy is left to accumulate in the situation itself. Mercier served as principal painter to Frederick, Prince of Wales from 1729, bringing Continental refinement to a court that had previously leaned heavily on portraiture, and his genre scenes helped shift English taste toward the more intimate, narrative-led work that would define the century. The Art Institute of Chicago holds the original, painted between 1740 and 1750, a period when Mercier's confidence in this kind of subject was at its height. Our hand-painted oil reproduction is executed on canvas using traditional techniques, matching the palette's warmth and the measured, unhurried brushwork that gives this Pierrot its peculiar, lasting stillness.