Sancho Panza Being Tossed in a Blanket

Pierre Charles Trémolières · 1723–24

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

28.9 × 36.8 cm (11 3/8 × 14 1/2 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Baroque

Trémolières captures one of Don Quixote's most undignified moments with a lightness of touch that somehow makes the humiliation both funny and oddly tender. Pierre Charles Trémolières was a French Rococo painter who trained at the Académie royale and spent formative years studying in Rome, absorbing the elegance of Italian decorative painting. He died in 1739 at just thirty-six, leaving behind a small but accomplished body of work distinguished by its fluid figures, warm palette, and effortless sense of movement. In this canvas, painted when he was still in his early twenties, those qualities are already fully formed — the tumbling Sancho a tangle of cloth and limbo, the figures around him caught mid-action with the energy of a sketch but the refinement of a finished work. The scene comes from Chapter XVII of Part I of Cervantes' novel, in which innkeepers toss Sancho in a blanket while Don Quixote watches helplessly from horseback, too tangled in his own armour to intervene — one of the few moments where the squire suffers and the knight can do nothing about it. Our hand-painted oil reproduction is made to order on canvas, following the original's composition and tonal range so that the warmth and spontaneity Trémolières put into the picture survive intact.