Ombres de carnaval

Overview

A pair of India-ink drawings on paper, each 20 × 38 cm (framed 35,5 × 55 cm), dated 1882, in the Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret in Nice under N.Mba 1977.1 and N.Mba 1977.2. The museum treats them as a diptych and calls them Ombres de carnaval: gesticulating figures of the Nice carnival, sketched in profile as silhouettes. Kernberger reproduces one of them as Deux silhouettes burlesques, 1882, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nice.

History

The Joconde notices record both sheets as acquired by the city in 1919, a gift by hand from the Bashkirtseff collection. They were shown in Nice in 2026–27 in the exhibition "De la scène à la toile", and the notices were written for it. The 1885 memorial catalogue lists a drawing Carnaval de Nice (no. 135). Whether that number covered these sheets cannot be settled from the catalogue, which gives no sizes for drawings.

References in Diary

The winter of 1882 is the moment. In January Marie, in Nice, was planning "un grand machin pour le Salon prochain, un coin de Carnaval" (094.0178, 15 January 1882). A week later she wrote "Je suis possédée pour le moment par le Carnaval, je fais des esquisses au fusain" (094.0198, 22 January), and on 30 January she needed "voir le Carnaval pour mon tableau" (094.0220). She described the first day of the carnival on 16 February, the family in a draped break and white Watteau dominoes, and found it a poor thing beside the Italian carnivals (094.0265–094.0269). By the end of May she had dropped the idea: "J'avais songé à un épisode du Carnaval... et j'y renonce" (095.0118). The diary speaks of charcoal sketches, and these drawings are in ink, so they cannot be matched to a particular entry. They are what survives of that winter's carnival project.

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