Parrots, parakeets, cockatoos and the humble budgerigar (a small parakeet) have long been popular domestic pets in Europe, and haven’t escaped the attention of artists. According to Richard Verdi, who has written a monograph on the subject, they appear in many paintings, often being symbols of the Virgin birth of Christ, or witnesses of the Fall of Man. In this week’s two articles considering the reading of paintings, I show a selection of works featuring these birds in different roles.

Parrots have been added to mythological paintings to supplement their original story.

In Tintoretto’s Leda and the Swan, from about 1578-83, there are two caged birds, a duck being taunted by a cat in the left foreground, and a parrot in the background. These allude to one of the most bizarre of Jupiter’s many rapes of mortal women, here in the form of a swan, resulting in his victim Leda laying eggs.

Tiepolo’s magnificent Death of Hyacinthus from about 1752-53 was inspired by an Italian translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses from 1561, where the fatal discus is replaced by what looks like a tennis ball, actually taken from the popular game of pallacorda. This classical story is told in the right foreground, with the pale Hyacinthus visibly bruised on his cheek, Apollo swooning above him, and Cupid to the right. Above that group is a grinning Pan in the form of a Herm, and at the top right a brightly coloured parrot, who appears oddly out of place.

Peter Paul Rubens’ version of The Fall of Man painted in 1628-29 changes Titian’s original depiction of Adam and adds a parrot as witness to Eve taking the apple from the serpent with a child’s head and body.

Alfred Stevens was an early enthusiast for Japonisme as it swept Paris, and provided insights into his life in his Psyché or My Studio from about 1871. The French word psyché refers to the full-length mirror seen in this apparently informal view of Stevens’ studio, the name deriving from the legend of Cupid and Psyche. For this painting, Stevens doesn’t use a genuine psyché, but has mounted a large mirror on his easel, suggesting that art is a reflection of life. A Japanese silk garment is draped over the mirror to limit its view to the model, and breaks up her form in an unnatural way. At the lower right, the artist indicates his presence with a cigarette, and there’s a small parrot who might imitate his speech.

The association between parrots and beautiful women has a long history.

Tintoretto’s Summer (c 1546) poses a reclining Titianesque nude before she removed her clothes against the summer harvest ripening behind her. She is joined by three birds, one an exotic parrot, with flowers of the dog rose, and hanging bunches of grapes.

In 1858, a popular translation of tales in Persian by Ṭūṭī-nāma of Żiyā’ al-Dīn Naḫšabī, who died around 751/1350-51, was published in Britain. Valentine Cameron Prinsep’s Lady of the Tooti-Nameh, or The Legend of the Parrot (c 1865) refers to that book, and was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1865, where it must have caused quite a sensation with its fleshly glimpses inside the woman’s blouse. The parrot perched on her hand is a hint of the exotic, but couldn’t have anticipated the painting shown by Gustave Courbet in the Paris Salon the following year.

Courbet’s model for his erotically charged Woman with a Parrot from 1866 was Joanna Hiffernan. The structure behind and to the right is a perch and feeder for the bird. This inevitably brought scandal, but didn’t deter others from painting pretty women with parrots. Édouard Manet’s A Young Lady in 1866, nicknamed Woman with a Parrot, was shown at the Salon two years later, and Auguste Renoir’s Woman with Parakeet followed in 1871, although at least their models were decently dressed.

Henry Tonks’ early portrait of A Girl with a Parrot from about 1893 provides an intimate glimpse into the private world of a young girl.

A brilliant green parakeet with its bright red bill adds colour to John William Godward’s Dolce Far Niente from 1897.

Painted late in his career, Émile Friant’s The Birds (1921) is a brilliantly colourful and detailed erotic fantasy demonstrating his great technical skills, but has drifted far from his earlier Naturalism and social concerns.

Soon after the Commedia dell’Arte had spread across Europe, travelling performers started entertaining the public with a different but related show, that of Punch and Judy. Mr Punch, the lead male, is based on Pulcinella, who is now a trickster figure who batters his wife Judy. The first recorded show in Britain was on 9 May 1662, using marionette puppets. For the last two hundred years or so, a stylised version performed using glove or other puppets has been popular with children visiting British resorts. In 1827, George Cruikshank made a series of sketches of a performance that were turned into the first illustrated and printed script.

Punch and Judy not only developed its own stereotype characters, but evolved its own plots. At first these shows appeared in street circuses around the towns and cities of Europe, then gravitated towards seaside resorts as they became popular in the summer. Characters from the Commedia also appeared as clowns in more established travelling circuses across Europe and North America.

Philip Hermogenes Calderon’s French Peasants Finding their Stolen Child (1859) draws on the troubled lives of those itinerant players. Various characters from a popular street theatre play are seen at the side of their stage. A couple are embracing a young girl, with the girl’s apparent mother kissing her somewhat reluctant daughter on the cheek.

In the background are the audience, and other stalls of a travelling fair. Entertainers in such fairs were vulnerable to crimes such as child abduction, or it may be that the couple and their daughter aren’t part of the fair, but locals who had their daughter abducted by its travelling performers.

Honoré Daumier’s The Parade, or Street Circus from about 1860 shows a group of mountebanks, theatrical performers, musicians, and clowns who drew large crowds. The crocodile is one of several novel characters from these Punch and Judy shows.

One of Émile Friant’s earliest works is this 1881 painting of The Entrance of the Clowns, showing the interior of the Big Top at the moment that the clowns, acrobats, and other entertainers parade. At the front is Pierrot, with Harlequin sprawling on the ground.

Among Paul Cézanne’s figurative paintings is this of Mardi Gras (Pierrot and Harlequin) from 1888.

The smaller of Fernand Pelez’ two paintings of Grimaces and Miseries: the Acrobats follows the pattern of a traditional ‘ages of man’ image, where its figures increase in stature from the start at the left edge, to the centre, then diminish again with advancing years, to the right. Standing in the middle are Pierrot and Harlequin.

Les Saltimbanques (Acrobats) had been a successful show in the theatre fifty years earlier, and had lived on in entertainments staged in fairs around France. Rosenblum summarises this painting as presenting “a glum view of the contrast between the goals of rousing entertainment in a popular Parisian circus troupe and the actual melancholy and isolation of the performers.” That sounds about right for Pierrot, at least.

Pelez’ later La Vachalcade (The Cow-valcade) (1896) is a reversal of a portrait of an affluent family by way of parody. Thirteen young revellers are taking part in a carnival procession, perhaps one of the Vachalcades which took place in Montmartre at the time. Some wear masks, others have the close-shorn hair characteristic of the poor, a measure against endemic parasites.

At the centre is a boy wearing an adult’s jacket and a huge hat. Behind him is a Pierrot character, and in the background a banner bearing the word Misère, misery. Dangling on that is a dead rat, a reference to a well-known café on the Place Pigalle. The ‘vache’ (cow) in the title refers to the French phrase manger de la vache enragée, meaning to live in poverty.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted this full-figure portrait of his son Jean as The White Pierrot during 1901-02.

Like Watteau earlier, the British painter Walter Sickert became interested in traditional pantomime, another derivative of the Commedia and Punch and Judy, seen in this gouache of Pierrot and Woman Embracing from about 1901. This is a preliminary sketch for a painting now in a private collection, Venetian Stage Scene.

Sickert spent much of the summer of 1915 visiting Brighton, where he made studies for Brighton Pierrots. This is a commissioned copy of his original, which remains in a private collection, and like that was painted following his return to his London studio. It shows a small group of entertainers who performed daily on a temporary stage set up on the beach.

Although William S Horton was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and trained in Chicago, Paris, and New York, he painted almost entirely in Europe. In about 1917, he arrived in Britain, and in 1920 painted this Punch and Judy show taking place on the beach at Broadstairs, Kent, a traditional family seaside resort at the extreme eastern tip of the south-east coast of England.

Edmond Aman-Jean’s Festival of Venice from 1923 is set at an open-air performance involving a Harlequin character with a moustache, who is offering a woman a pink flower, presumably in an effort to woo her. At the right is a chorus of three women, and another sits asleep in a chair at the far right. A young woman seated at the front of the wooden stage is playing a hurdy gurdy, and a girl to the left of her is making a floral decoration.

The descendants of the commedia dell’arte live on, five centuries after the first Pierrots and Harlequins brought laughter to audiences.

Reference

Wikipedia