Details
Probably modelled by Paul Hannong, standing in a white hat with puce ribbon, a pale blue skull cap and ruff, with white tunic, trousers and shoes, with puce laces, on a grassy green mound base before a tree-stump support
1318 in. (33.5 cm.) high
Provenance
Anonymous sale; Sotheby's, London, 24 May 1966, lot 11.
The Collections of Hanns and Elisabeth Weinberg and the Antique Porcelain Company; sale Sotheby's, New York, 11 November 2006, lot 559.
La March Comique, Porcelain from the Patricia Hart Collection; sale in these Rooms, 5 July 2012, lot 17.
Literature
Birte Abraham, Commedia dell'Arte, The Patricia & Rodes Hart Collection of European Porcelain and Faience, Amsterdam, 2010, pp. 180-181.
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Lot Essay

Pierrot's character was first introduced in Molière's play Dom Juan ou le festin de pierre which was performed at the Palais Royal in 1665 by French actors. Pierrot was a simple character with an accent from the Île de France, and Molière 'appears to have adopted an existing character of the commedia dell'Arte, Pedrolino, a young, personable, and gullible servant who was both innocent and charming, but nonetheless comic, and transformed him into Pierrot'.1 The painting of Pierrot by Jean-Antoine Watteau carried out in 1719 perfectly captures the melancholic vulnerability of this character, and it was probably based on the actor Gilles le Niais. Watteau used a similar pose for Pierrot in different paintings, and these were all made widely available in engravings. Meredith Chilton notes that Nicolas Lancret also used the same pose for Pierrot in his painting Le théâtre italien, and 'numerous engravers in France, the Netherlands, and Germany copied or reissued engravings of these paintings and, as a result, Watteau's pose for Pierrot became standardized'.2

Only three other examples of this figure appear to be recorded, see Reinhard Jansen (ed.), Commedia dell'Arte, Fest der Komödianten, Keramische Kostbarkeiten aus den Museen der Welt, Stuttgart, 2001, p. 297, no. 303 for a coloured example, formerly in the Henry Levy Collection, now in the collection of Irene and Peter Ludwig, Altes Rathaus Bamberg (inv. no. L 188), a the white example sold by Sotheby's London on 16 July 1991, lot 33 and another illustrated Camille Leprince, Comédies de Faïence, La sculpture à Strasbourg sous Paul Hannon (1740-1754), Feu et Talent, Paris, 2017 (11 September-11 October 2017), p. 55.

1. Meredith Chilton, Harlequin Unmasked, The Commedia dell'Arte and Porcelain Sculpture, Singapore, 2001, p. 100.
2. Meredith Chilton, ibid., 2001, p. 335, note 117.

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