Subject: a true story
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Wed Mar 29 2000 - 02:02:58 EST
In both Daumier's & Picasso's saltimbiques there appears
that funny two peaked cap. Yet I always associate the word
'saltimbique' with the harlequin multicoloured suit - no doubt
because this appears (as I remember) in several of Picasso's
other Rose Period clown paintings.
In a drawer in a room upstairs I keep an oval clay tablet
(about 12cm X 9cm) on which is painted in perfect, obsessional
detail & glowing colours a weeping harlequin. This was a
going-away present from a patient of mine who was both
a professional artist & a very beautiful young woman. She had
long, breathtaking auburn hair, the loveliest cat face & a charmingly
immature, hysterical personality. In the year or so of our acquaintance
I failed to make more than the smallest of dents in her incipient
alcoholism. She went off to London to find broader fields
for her ambition & about four years later she was found dead
with a bottle of drink & an empty carton of sleeping tablets
beside her bed.
During her time in our hospital she gave painting classes to some
of the other patients & went on with her own work - which was,
more or less exclusively, a huge series of 'harlequin studies'.
These were all painted on her clay tablets & showed harlequins:
singly, in couples & in families, smiling, crying, standing on their
hands,
embracing, carrying on in every conceivable harlequinish way.
As Thurber might have said: we had harlequins like other people
have mice.
Despite my great affection for her & unqualified admiration of
her skills, it always seemed to me that the harlequin was a regrettably
banal image. The weeping clown is the most cliched of characters -
used by countless second-rate commentators. It was quite an apt
symbol for her own particular life. Yet how I wish she'd found
a more sustaining, earthier figure to model herself on - & that
I'd been more successful in helping her find it.
Scottie B.
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