Trial of Pierrot

Jehan Georges Vibert · n.d.

Medium

Watercolor and gouache, over graphite, on cream board

Original size

39.3 × 63 cm (15 1/2 × 24 13/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Romanticism

Trial of Pierrot places one of theatre's most melancholy figures — the white-clad fool of the commedia dell'arte — before some form of judgement, investing a comic archetype with an air of quiet pathos. Jehan Georges Vibert was among the most technically accomplished French Academic painters of the nineteenth century, celebrated for scenes that combined meticulous draughtsmanship with wry, knowing humour. Working here in watercolour and gouache over a graphite underdrawing on cream board, he achieves a luminosity that oil alone rarely affords — the layering of opaque gouache against translucent washes gives figures their weight while keeping the palette delicate and stage-lit. Vibert was as comfortable with theatrical subject matter as he was with his better-known clerical satires, and the character of Pierrot gave him room to blend comedy with something more elegiac. Pierrot had been a fixture of French popular culture since the seventeenth century and enjoyed a particular renaissance in Symbolist and fin-de-siècle art, where his naivety and sorrow became a vehicle for deeper themes. This hand-painted oil reproduction translates Vibert's refined draughtsmanship and tonal subtlety onto canvas, preserving the composed theatricality of the original held at the Art Institute of Chicago.