仮面舞踊会の後の決闘

Dawn in a snowy wood: a Pierrot collapses, bleeding, into the arms of his friends, while a man dressed as an American Indian walks away. Gerome painted the morning after a costume ball, when the party ends in death.

The story behind the painting

Jean-Leon Gerome showed the original, Suite d'un bal masque, at the Paris Salon of 1857, and then in London the same year with the English dealer Gambart. It became famous almost overnight, and critics speculated about the real incident behind it. The theme seems to have been in fashion: Thomas Couture painted the same subject in 1857, a work now in the Wallace Collection. The Duke of Aumale acquired the painting in 1858. Gerome borrowed it back for the Universal Exhibition of 1867, where he received the Grand Prix for painting. The original belongs to the Musee Conde in Chantilly.

What to look for

The scene takes place on a grey winter morning in the Bois de Boulogne, with bare trees and snow on the ground. A man dressed as Pierrot has been mortally wounded and falls into the arms of a man costumed as the Duc de Guise. A surgeon dressed as a Venetian doge tries to stop the bleeding, while a figure in a Domino costume clutches his own head. The winner, dressed as an American Indian, walks away towards his waiting carriage with his second, Harlequin, leaving behind his weapon and a few feathers from his headdress. The bright costumes look absurd in the cold light, and that strangeness turns into pity at the sight of blood on the white Pierrot.

Meaning and intent

It was typical of Gerome to paint not the violent act itself but its aftermath. He did the same in The Death of Caesar, The Execution of Marshal Ney and Jerusalem. Here we do not see the swords cross; we arrive just too late, when nothing can be undone. The masks of a night of pleasure are still on, but the game is over. The contrast between carnival dress and real death gives the picture its silent, uneasy power, and it is why viewers have kept asking what quarrel could have led to such a dawn.

Legacy

The success was so great that Gerome painted replicas, which was not unusual for artists at the time. He made versions for Prince Alexander of Russia, now in the Hermitage Museum, and for Ali Pasha. In 1859 William Thompson Walters bought another replica at the National Academy of Design in New York and asked for a letter of authentication from Gerome comparing it to the original; that version is now in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. In a poll in the winter of 1909 to 1910, Baltimoreans named it their favourite among fifty-five works of art.