Georges Rouault
1871 - 1956
Auguste
Oil, gouache, indian ink on paper laid down on canvas; stamped with the studio mark; and initialled by Isabelle Rouault on the verso canvas.
6.75 x 5 5/8 inches; 17.2 x 14.2 cms.
Provenance: The Estate of the Artist.
Private collection.
This is painted over the upper part of the black and white proof for the aquatint of the same title [plate XV1] of the 1938 publication Cirque de L’Etoile Filante [Circus of the Shooting Star].
In Rouault’s accompanying text to this publication, he recalls his childhood escape into another world:
Dream or reality: even had the pale child of the suburbs not wandered into the big tent of ‘The Circus of the Shooting Star’, he would, as he grew older, have found other excuses to forget the long winters, the joyless days, the hard or hostile masks of the dispirited and the withered of heart.
The clown occupied a special place in Rouault’s heart. And his work proclaims his vital role. In Cirque de L’Etoile Filante, in which ten of the seventeen coloured aquatints portray clowns, he writes:
Strolling players over all the highways of the Ile-de-France, drifting from North to South, from East to West, fun-loving, peace-making conquerors who go your way in winter toward the sun, the green plain in spring or towards the ocean sea. I have always envied you, I a recluse tilling the pictorial soil as the peasant tills his field.
‘Rouault sur l’Art et sur la Vie’:
Images and colours are, for a painter, his way of being, of living, of thinking, of feeling. For this poor devil, art is his only reason for being.
To André Suarès 1926
My clowns are not so much disposed kings, their laughter is familiar to me, they touch on the insanity of repressed sobs and bitter resignation with which I am well acquainted…Empty gestures and virtuosity with an unfeeling heart are alien to me. What we are we expose so well, without meaning to, or knowing it…..
Sometimes one has to smile or even laugh at oneself in order to keep one’s balance. Certain people have often reproached me for this smile, for this internal smile as they call it, which seems to originate from men of the church and from the clown……
I take no pride in stating that I am not of my time, it is not my fault, others are proud of regarding themselves as modernists, but are they? It is easy to stick a label onto goods, in fact only too easy. Form and colour, that is our language….