Polichinelle by Édouard Manet

With one hand raised and the other hanging beside his coat, Polichinelle appears to have caught us in the middle of a performance. His enormous hat leans above a red face, white moustache and spreading ruff. Rose, yellow, blue and deep green divide his costume into bright, unequal parts. Around this elaborate figure, Manet leaves an almost empty grey-green space.

Painted in 1873, this Polichinelle is an oil on canvas, measuring 50.5 × 32.8 cm in the later Sotheby’s catalogue.^[1] It belongs to a group of related images through which Manet explored a familiar theatrical character. The painting’s raised hand distinguishes it immediately from his colour lithograph of 1874, where Polichinelle strides forward with a baton behind his back.

A Gesture in an Empty Space

Polichinelle’s raised arm opens the upper right of the painting. The forearm slopes upwards, ending in an exposed palm and fingers that spread beyond the white cuff. The gesture carries across the surrounding ground, as though the figure were addressing somebody just outside the picture.

His other arm descends at our left. Its long yellow and blue sleeve leads towards a loosely held hand, surrounded by pale ruffled fabric. The two arms give the body unequal extensions: one lifts away from the torso, while the other follows its downward weight. The pose feels active even though both feet remain firmly associated with the floor.

The face provides a second point of address. It turns towards us beneath the overhanging hat, with a prominent nose, dark eyes and white hair at the sides. The moustache introduces a pale horizontal mark above the mouth. Red and warm brown give the face its colour, while small dark touches establish the features without surrounding every form with a continuous outline.

There is no painted audience, stage curtain or identifiable room. Manet lets the costume and gesture carry the theatrical setting. The floor becomes legible through the shoes and the long shadows spreading towards our left, rather than through boards, tiles or a clearly drawn junction with a wall.

This spareness gives the silhouette unusual importance. The lifted sleeve, pointed hat, projecting front and rounded form behind the shoulder all push against the empty ground. Each change in direction remains visible. A crowded setting would make those costume shapes compete with other objects; here they establish the painting’s entire rhythm.

The gesture suggests an address, but Manet supplies no particular speech or episode. We can imagine a performer greeting, announcing or arguing without being able to choose one action conclusively. The picture holds the moment in that useful interval between a recognisable theatrical presence and an unfinished story.

How the Costume Holds Together

The hat is almost a performance in itself. Folded blue and rose sections rise above the head, edged with pale and golden marks. Its irregular outline reaches far beyond the face, making the head look comparatively small. Light catches some ridges while adjacent dark passages deepen the folds.

Below it, the white ruff spreads out in angular points. Grey shadows separate the folds, so that the collar has weight and volume despite its brightness. It creates a clear interval between the red face and the darker coat, preventing the figure’s most detailed areas from merging.

The body is built from strikingly different colour fields. A dark green-blue front descends towards the thighs, bordered by light trim. A rose-coloured padded form projects at our right, with a row of pale ornaments following its outer edge. Behind the opposite shoulder, a rounded blue form enlarges the back of the costume. The comic exaggeration depends on these additions to the body’s ordinary outline.

Yellow runs down the lowered sleeve, crossed by blue and pale strokes. The raised sleeve carries the rose colour upwards, joining the projecting front to the open hand. These unequal sleeves make the arms easy to follow even where the brushwork breaks into separate marks.

The contrasts continue below the coat. Red and dark green-blue divide the legs, with small yellow and blue passages keeping the changes from becoming too regular. The nearer foot turns towards the spectator; the other extends sideways. Red shoes and white ornaments bring the costume’s colour pattern down to the ground.

At close range, the trim resolves into flecks, dashes and short curves. The broad coloured fabric is handled more continuously, though its strokes remain visible. Manet varies the scale of the marks according to the task: a large patch establishes a sleeve, while a few small touches suggest the glint and decoration along its edge.

White connects the collar, cuffs and shoe ornaments. Those separated light passages draw the eye between the upper body, hands and feet.

A Familiar Comic Character

Polichinelle had a life in French popular entertainment long before Manet painted him. Related to the Italian Pulcinella of the commedia dell’arte, the French character became familiar through stage performances, puppet shows and carnival. Theodore Reff traces his appearance on the Parisian stage to the early seventeenth century and stresses his popularity in children’s puppet theatres.^[2]

That history helps explain why such an extravagant costume could be immediately intelligible. The oversized forms, conspicuous nose and theatrical hat belonged to an established comic identity. A viewer did not need to know the posing model to recognise the role.

Manet had already used Polichinelle imagery in frontispieces for an album of etchings in 1862. Reff connects those designs with the puppet theatre run in the Tuileries Gardens by the writer Edmond Duranty. His account places the character within Manet’s interest in contemporary Parisian entertainment as well as older theatrical tradition.^[2]

The character also appears among the costumed visitors in Masked Ball at the Opera. There, bright fancy dress interrupts a crowd dominated by men’s dark evening clothes. In the separate oil, Manet gives one costumed figure the space and attention that the crowded scene distributes among many people.

The two settings offer different ways of encountering the same disguise. At the ball it belongs to a social gathering; against the empty ground it becomes the principal subject. Costume passes from an element within modern city life to something that can sustain a painting on its own.

The Man Behind the Disguise

Reff identifies the model as Edmond André, Manet’s neighbour and a fellow artist.^[2] The identification introduces a distinction between the person who stood in the studio and the comic figure he represented. A painter could borrow Polichinelle’s costume and gestures without becoming a professional performer or sharing the character’s supposed temperament.

A contemporary studio account gives an appealing glimpse of this process. Writing under the name Fervacques in December 1873, Léon Duchemin described a Polichinelle painting hanging among Manet’s works while the artist made a watercolour of another costumed pose. The account, quoted in the later auction catalogues, places the completed oil and a fresh sitting within the same studio visit.^[1][3]

It suggests a practical interest in what the costume could do. Once a model put it on, Manet could reconsider the angle of the body, the direction of a hand and the balance of its large coloured forms. The resulting images share an identity while allowing separate solutions to the problem of showing a figure.

The oil also sits naturally beside Manet’s other full-length costumed subjects. The Spanish Singer concentrates attention on a musician and his instrument; The Fifer gives a uniformed boy a similarly spare setting. Polichinelle brings a more irregular silhouette and a broader gesture to that sustained interest in figures whose clothing announces a role.

The auction essays discuss this group in relation to Manet’s admiration for Spanish painting, particularly Velázquez. Christie’s also proposes Watteau’s Gilles as a comparison.^[1][3] These connections offer ways to think about the dignity and concentration given to theatrical subjects. They leave room for the particular character of Manet’s picture: its small scale, brilliant costume and direct engagement with the spectator.

From Oil Painting to Colour Print

Manet’s Polichinelle images extend across several media. Reff distinguishes an oil sketch, the finished oil, a watercolour of December 1873 and the colour lithograph.^[2] The finished canvas has the raised-hand pose seen here. The lithograph reorganises the character around a forward step and arms held behind the body.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s impression, dated 1874, Polichinelle advances towards our right. One shoe lifts from the ground, its toe tipped upwards. His upper body leans in the same direction, while the large hat and padded back give weight to the opposite side. The baton runs diagonally down towards our left from the hands behind him.^[4]

Colour changes the balance too. Pink occupies much of the coat, and green fills the projecting front. Yellow appears over the back and along the leg; blue occupies a broad section of the trousers. The same general vocabulary of colours produces a different arrangement, suited to the changed pose.

Fine dark lines describe folds, facial features and the edges of the costume. Areas of printed colour sit within and across that drawn structure. Compared with the oil’s dark surrounding ground and broad fabric strokes, the light paper gives the figure a more open, linear setting.

The printed sheet also includes words. Beneath the figure are the printer’s information and a short verse by Théodore de Banville, whose name appears below the couplet.^[4] The verse presents Polichinelle through his fierce colour, boldness and comic excess. Image and text together give the sheet a public voice beyond the silent gesture of the oil.

An impression’s paper, lettering and colouring belong to that particular object’s history. The Met’s lithograph is one example of the printed image, with an image area of 52 × 37 cm on a larger sheet.^[4] Those measurements describe the print and should be kept separate from the much smaller oil canvas.

What Appeared at the Salon of 1874?

The relationship between watercolour and print becomes especially interesting in the work Manet exhibited at the Salon of 1874. Juliet Wilson-Bareau identifies it as a hand-coloured lithographic proof, with gouache and watercolour applied over the printed design. Now associated with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, it served as a guide for the colour stones used in producing the chromolithograph.^[5]

The proof joins two kinds of making. A printed image establishes the design, while the applied paint sets out how colour should animate it. Describing it only as a watercolour loses the printed foundation; treating it as an ordinary finished colour impression loses the purpose of its hand colouring.

This Salon exhibit therefore belongs to the development of the lithographic image. It is a separate object from the 1873 oil and from the published impression at the Met. Its presence at the exhibition shows how a character already explored in paint could move through another medium and reach a different public.^[5]

Was Polichinelle a Political Satire?

The printed pose has prompted a more specific interpretation. Reff argues that its figure resembles Marshal Patrice de MacMahon, who became president of the French Republic in May 1873. He reads the stance as military and the baton as a possible allusion to the marshal’s authority.^[2]

Reff also recounts a printer’s assistant’s later recollection that police destroyed impressions intended for subscribers to the republican newspaper Le Temps. This is evidence of a reported episode in the print’s reception, conveyed through a retrospective account. It does not by itself establish an official explanation for the action.^[2]

The MacMahon reading remains an interpretation of the image’s political possibilities. Christie’s surveys objections to making it the subject’s sole explanation, including the character’s established popularity and his association with resistance to authority.^[3] Polichinelle could carry a mischievous, unruly public identity without every appearance becoming a portrait of one politician.

The oil makes that breadth particularly apparent. Its open hand and almost frontal address differ from the lithograph’s marching figure and concealed baton. A political reading of those printed details cannot simply be transferred to a canvas in which they do not appear. The oil gives sustained attention to the comic costume, the model’s stance and the expressive possibilities of paint.

Collectors and Exhibitions

The singer and collector Jean-Baptiste Faure acquired the oil from Manet in 1873, according to the Sotheby’s provenance. It appeared in Faure’s sale in 1878 and later passed through the collections of Mme Martinet, Claude Lafontaine and Auguste Pellerin. The record continues through the 1926 sale, Jos Hessel and the Pellerin collection to a Christie’s auction in New York in 1999.^[1]

The painting has also been seen in exhibitions beyond those changes of ownership. Sotheby’s records its appearance at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in 1928 and in the Manet exhibition at the Fondation Pierre Gianadda in Martigny in 1996.^[1]