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    Family of Saltimbanques

    Pablo Picasso

    From the boards pale Harlequin
    First salutes the spectators
    Sorcerers from Bohemia
    Fairies sundry enchanters

    Guillaume Apollinaire, “Crépuscule,” written 1905 as “Spectacle,” published 1909

    Measuring 7 by 7.5 feet, Family of Saltimbanques is the most important painting Picasso made during his early career. Immediately obvious is the isolation and stillness of its figures. Shouldn’t these acrobats, dancers, and jesters suggest the frolic or at least the forced gaiety of circus performance?

    That was not what Picasso had in mind. For him, these wandering saltimbanques stood for the melancholy of the neglected underclass of artistes, a kind of extended family with whom he identified. Like them, the Spanish-born Picasso was transient during his first years in Paris while striving for recognition. Eventually he found a dilapidated apartment in Montmartre, where he and his friends regularly attended the local Cirque Médrano’s performances. Picasso made many images of circus performers in 1904–1905, most of them representing couples with their babies and troupe animals, posed “portrait” images, and figures at practice.

    Pablo Picasso, Six Circus Horses with Riders, 1905, pen and black ink on wove paper; laid down on cardboard, Gift of Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art, 1990.49.2

    A pale, gray skinned young man stands next to a vase and plate of food against a pinkish-tan background in this loosely painted vertical painting on cardboard. The man’s body faces us but he looks down and slightly to our right with deeply shadowed eyes under dark brows. He has close-cropped, dark brown hair, a straight nose, and his full mouth is closed. He wears a slate-blue, fitted jacket over leggings, both painted with smudges of gray, dark green, and lilac purple, and some areas of the tan background show through. His feet are bare. The man’s left elbow, on our right, is bent so he holds his hand at his chest. The fingers of his other hand splay over his hip. Loosely painted and indistinct, a box-like form next to the man’s feet seems to be draped with a translucent white cloth. The box or table holds a tall terracotta vase behind a white dish. Four oval-shaped objects, painted with marigold orange and buttercup yellow, fill the plate and another sits on the cloth next to the dish. Sweeping but vague coral-peach lines and washes on the background suggest that the man may stand in front of a curtain. The artist signed the work “Picasso” in the lower left.

    Pablo Picasso, Juggler with Still Life, 1905, gouache on cardboard, Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.191

    A young man and boy look at a man laid out on a bed in this horizontal composition. All three people have white-colored skin and are loosely painted, as is the incomplete setting. The man lies with his eyes closed on the bed with his head to our left and feet to our right. He is on a baby-blue field, perhaps a blanket, and his head is propped up on a thick white pillow. He has black hair and delicate features, and his hands are together in prayer over his belly. The white ruffled collar and a diamond made up of smaller red, blue, yellow, and black diamonds are painted on his shoulder. The rest of his body is blocked in loosely with lapis blue except the cuff we can see, which is bright white. The young man and boy look on from near the man’s shins on the far side of the bed. Both have close-cropped hair. The young man cranes his neck forward, and his head and shoulders are surrounded by a white field against the brown cardboard on which this is painted. His garment is white over the shoulders and red on the torso. Only the head and neck of the boy are visible beyond the prone man. The artist signed the work in black in the lower right corner, “Picasso.”

    Pablo Picasso, The Death of Harlequin [recto], 1905, gouache over charcoal on cardboard, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1996.129.1.a

    The stark background he assigned to this work casts a haunting sense of loneliness on these vagabond performers. Its chalky, rose-blue palette may reference the colors of actual circus costumes of the time while setting a mood of ethereal sadness.

    Pablo Picasso, Landscape near Schoorl, 1905. © Musee Picasso, Paris.

    The background may have been inspired by the scruffy fairground areas on the fringes of Paris that had escaped the city’s long-standing campaign of upgrading, and by the wide, rolling sand dunes of coastal Holland, where he spent June and July of 1905 sketching two notebooks full of drawings related to the theme and setting of Family of Saltimbanques.

    Family of Saltimbanques pays tribute to the circus’s stock players while also serving as autobiography. The dark, brooding silhouette of Harlequin—in diamond-printed costume, far left—is the dark, intense young artist himself.

    The original tonality of this painting was bluish. Scientific study has revealed three other states of this image under its final version. In them, Picasso altered figures and composition and switched from blue to rose, consciously allowing the darker paint to show through as he reworked his canvas. In this way, he created contour as well as a dusky, veiled atmosphere worthy of his waif-like figures.

    About the Artist

    Pablo Picasso, a) Self-Portrait; b) Untitled (Woman Strolling), 1901/1902, a) black chalk and watercolor on wove paper; b) black chalk on wove paper, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection, 1970.17.164.a-b

    After shattering representational tradition through cubism, which he developed with Georges Braque, Picasso became the artistic visionary against whom most others measured their creativity throughout the 20th century.

    The son of an artist, Picasso attended art schools in his native Spain and in his late teens aligned his sensibilities with bohemian writers and artists in Barcelona and Madrid who opposed Spain’s stalled social hierarchies and conservative culture.

    After early work inspired by international models—the anguished, attenuated figures of El Greco, the dark, moody outlines of symbolism, and the sinuous curvatures of art nouveau to name a few—Picasso began to find his own vision. The art he made in the decade between 1905 and 1915 unleashed a torrent of originality—Rose and Blue Period pieces that probe the emotional depths of his personal experiences and identity; masklike portraits and heavily faceted nudes that translate classical and primal aspects of ancient, Iberian, and African cultures, culminating in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907); and the cubist and collage works which, in their fragmentation of illusionism, delivered Picasso’s breakthrough.    

    Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, 1932, gelatin silver print, Patrons' Permanent Fund, 1995.36.100

    Over a long lifetime Picasso was famously productive. In the decades following 1915, he incorporated decorativeness into cubism and explored wide-ranging concepts—especially the erotic abandon espoused by the surrealists—in an astounding array of mediums: costume and theatre design, sculpture, ceramics, prints, watercolors, paintings, and public commissions. In his works on paper Picasso created a trove of prints and drawings in which mythology and the sexy beast Minotaur (his alter ego) figure prominently. He also worked on suites of images exploring the elements of creative practice: the artist’s studio and the relationship of artist and model.

    In his last decades Picasso took on the great masters—pitting his print, watercolor, and painted works against signature images by Nicolas Poussin, Louis Le Nain, Diego Velázquez, Rembrandt van Rijn, Édouard Manet, and others—just as artists who followed Picasso would test themselves against his example. Pablo Ruiz Picasso died in 1972 at age 91.

    Crépuscule, a poem by Picasso's friend and writer Guillaume Apollinaire

    During his early years in Paris Picasso was so close to his writer and poet friends that he penned “Au Rendez-vous des poètes” on the door of his Montmartre apartment. Here, the poem Crépuscule (Twilight) by Guillaume Apollinaire, poet and writer as well as Picasso’s friend, artistic champion, and fellow spectator at performances of the Cirque Medrano.

    Brushed by the shadows of the dead
    On the grass where day expires
    Columbine strips bare admires
    her body in the pond instead

    A charlatan of twilight formed
    Boasts of the tricks to be performed
    The sky without a stain unmarred
    Is studded with the milk-white stars

    From the boards pale Harlequin
    First salutes the spectators
    Sorcerers from Bohemia
    Fairies sundry enchanters

    Having unhooked a star
    He proffers it with outstretched hand
    While with his feet a hanging man
    Sounds the cymbals bar by bar

    The blind man rocks a pretty child
    The doe with all her fauns slips by
    The dwarf observes with saddened pose
    How Harlequin magically grows

    Translation by A. S. Kline (c) 2002 All Rights Reserved

    In-depth Feature
    Picasso’s painting The Tragedy and related conservation issues

    Slideshow
    Picasso: The Early Years - survey of Picasso's art before cubism (middle school and high school)

    Audio
    Picasso: The Saltimbanques - chronicles the scientific study that revealed three iterations of this image which together comprise the artist’s final painting

    Podcast Series
    Picasso and Truth - a six part series of lectures by art historian and professor T. J. Clark

    A group of three men, two children, and one woman gather in an empty, dusky rose-pink landscape under a blue, cloudy sky in this nearly square painting. Most of the people have muted, peachy skin, and the woman and the youngest boy have cream-white skin. The woman sits on the ground to our right, apart from the rest of the men and children. She wears a coral-red skirt, a beige shawl, and straw hat, and she looks into the distance to our right. The others stand in a loose semi-circle on the left half of the composition. A man wearing a multicolored, diamond-patterned costume stands with his back to us to the left. He looks to our right in profile and holds the hand of a little girl who also stands with her back to us. She wears a pink dress and white stockings, and her right hand rests on the tall handle of a white basket. A portly man wearing a scarlet-red jester’s costume and pointed hat stands opposite this pair, facing us to our right. Next to him to our right a young man wears a tan-colored leotard with a black bottom. He holds a barrel over his right shoulder and looks over to our right. The sixth person is the youngest boy, who wears a baggy blue and red outfit, and he looks toward the woman. The eyes of all the figures are deeply shadowed.

    Pablo Picasso, Family of Saltimbanques, 1905, oil on canvas, Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.190

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    Frôlée par les ombres des morts
    Sur l'herbe où le jour s'exténue
    L'arlequine s'est mise nue
    Et dans l'étang mire son corps

    Un charlatan crépusculaire
    Vante les tours que l'on va faire
    Le ciel sans teinte est constellé
    D'astres pâles comme du lait

    Sur les tréteaux l'arlequin blême
    Salue d'abord les spectateurs
    Des sorciers venus de Bohême
    Quelques fées et les enchanteurs

    Ayant décroché une étoile
    Il la manie à bras tendu
    Tandis que des pieds un pendu
    Sonne en mesure les cymbales

    L'aveugle berce un bel enfant
    La biche passe avec ses faons
    Le nain regarde d'un air triste
    Grandir l'arlequin trismégiste

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