Family of Saltimbanques
 | |
| Artist | Pablo Picasso |
|---|---|
| Year | 1905 |
| Type | oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 212.8 cm × 229.6 cm (83 3⁄4 in × 90 3⁄8 in) |
| Location | Chester Dale Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. |
Family of Saltimbanques (La famille de saltimbanques) is a 1905 painting by Pablo Picasso. It is considered the masterpiece of Picasso's Rose Period sometimes called Picasso's circus period.[1] Its dimensions are 212.8 x 229.6 cm or (83 3/4 in × 90 3/8 in); and (framed 240.4 x 256.3 cm).
The painting depicts six saltimbanques, a kind of itinerant circus performer, in a desolate landscape. The composition groups them together, but they do not seem connected to each other and are not looking at each other.[2]
It was painted during a period from late 1904 to early 1906, where Picasso explored themes using the saltimbanque. Picasso frequently attended the Cirque Médrano in Montmartre. Critics have suggested Family of Saltimbanques is a covert group portrait of Picasso and his circle, symbolized as poor, independent, and isolated.[3]
Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was inspired by this painting as he wrote the fifth of ten elegies in his Duino Elegies (1923). Rilke used the figures in Picasso's painting as a symbol of "human activity...always travelling and with no fixed abode, they are even a shade more fleeting than the rest of us, whose fleetingness was lamented." Further, although Picasso's painting depicts the figures in a desolate desert landscape, Rilke described them as standing on a "threadbare carpet" to suggest "the ultimate loneliness and isolation of Man in this incomprehensible world, practicing their profession from childhood to death as playthings of an unknown will...before their 'pure too-little; had passed into 'empty too-much'."[4]
A related work in gouache and pastel is Family of Acrobats (1905).[5]
References
- ↑ Picasso: The Early Years, 1892-1906. National Gallery of Art
- ↑ Staff report (October 13, 1947). Picasso: The brilliant Spaniard is this era's most important painter. But is he a truly great artist? Life
- ↑ Carmean E. A. (1970). Picasso, The saltimbanques. National Gallery of Art
- ↑ Leishman, J. B.; and Spender, Stephen. Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1939) 102-103.
- ↑ Picasso-paintings.org
