L'Arlequin (Saint-Marceaux)

Overview

L'Arlequin is the full-length figure of the commedia dell'arte Harlequin by the sculptor René de Saint-Marceaux (1845-1915): a masked, long-limbed figure with his arms folded on his chest and a wooden bat in his hand, head tilted in sceptical amusement. It was shown at the Paris Salon of 1880, and the plaster is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Reims (given by the artist in 1880; 175 × 65.7 × 62 cm); bronze reductions were made and sold. French Wikipedia quotes a judgment of the day: « Après l'œuvre de noble majesté, un poème de spirituelle malice », the Arlequin being a break with the neoclassical manner of his earlier Génie (see Le Génie gardant le secret de la tombe). (Sources: French Wikipedia, « René de Saint-Marceaux »; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims record on Wikimedia Commons. Inventory dates the work 1879; the plaster record says 1879, the Salon showing was 1880.)

Marie and the Arlequin

Marie is a fanatical admirer of Saint-Marceaux, and the Arlequin is the work that she returns to most. On 16 May 1880 at the Salon: after a year she had begun to think she had overrated him (the previous Salon's honour, « la médaille d'honneur », had gone to her head); « cet Arlequin me rouvre les yeux... Une chose si ingrate mais que de talent, c'est plus que du talent. C'est un vrai artiste » (088.0211).

On 11 April 1883, at the Arts Décoratifs, she sees a reduction: « Jamais encore l'art ne m'a émue à ce point... La peinture ? Qu'est-ce que la peinture ! » She calls the figure « une œuvre de haute philosophie... la plus grandiose image d'un esprit supérieur qui voit défiler devant lui les vices, les ridicules, les infamies de ce monde » and wonders where the critic is who has written about it as a philosopher (099.0103, with a reader footnote; 099.0106: « Tout paraît flasque après l'Arlequin »). Within a month she owns one: on 9 May 1883 she mentions that she has had an Arlequin in bronze for three or four days (099.0386) and on the same day rages that it is « débiné » as an « ouvrage d'homme du monde » (099.0394). On 2 June 1883 she cites it as proof that « le monde est méprisable » (100.0057); on 14 September 1883 she goes to see « Saint-Marceaux, l'Arlequin, le Génie et le portrait de M. Renan » (101.0346).

Other Saint-Marceaux works in the diary

Marie's other references: the busts that « saisie » her at the exhibition of the rue de Sèze (Cercle des arts libéraux) on 19 December 1882, where she spoke to him (« je bégayais de peur », 097.0268, 097.0322-0323); the bust of Bastien-Lepage he is making in April 1883 (099.0139); a statue of a dancing woman barely begun in his studio on 29 May 1883 (« la danse... une rêverie de la danse », 100.0035-0037); the bust of Ernest Renan seen at his studio on 16 June 1883 (100.0170) and again « à travers le buste » when Renan speaks at Turgenev's departure on 1 October 1883 (101.0471). French Wikipedia lists a plaster Buste d'Ernest Renan (1883) in the musée de la Vie romantique, Paris. A bust of « le père Hecht » is also mentioned; these works have no separate entries yet. The existing person entry, Saint Marceaux, is a stub filed under people/religious.