The Comedy of Art
The painting “Family of Saltimbanques,” by Pablo Picasso, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., has a well-documented provenance going back to its creation in 1905. The painting was originally purchased directly from Picasso in 1908 by André Level, a Parisian lawyer and financier, for the collection La Peau de l'Ours. Six years later, in 1914, it was sold at Hôtel Drouot in Paris and acquired by the Thannhauser Galleries in Munich. Between November 1914 and June 1915, the painting was bought by Hertha Koenig, a German poet and art patron, and who was a close friend of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. The work then passed to the Valentine Gallery in New York, where it was sold in 1931 to Chester Dale, a New York banker and art collector. Dale, who amassed a significant collection of modern French art, bequeathed the painting to the National Gallery of Art upon his death in 1962, and it officially entered the museum’s collection in 1963. The painting has since become a centerpiece of the Gallery’s modern art holdings and a highlight of the Chester Dale Collection. The painting, which measures approximately 83 inches by 90 inches, was painted by the young Picasso at a time when he was fascinated by Commedia dell'Arte, and he depicted many clowns, acrobats, and circus families in his work of the Blue Period, usually in a mournful key. A background fact of artistic trivia is that Picasso has, in “Family of Saltimbanques” painted Harlequin with Picasso's own face. Scholars and historians have pointed-out that the other actors may be portraits of his friends and artist associates. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a personal friend of the German poet and art patron Hertha Koenig, is said to have been inspired by the painting to write his fifth Duino Elegy, in 1922, which begins:
But tell me, who are they, these
acrobats, even a little
more fleeting than we ourselves...