Artist: Pablo Picasso (Spanish b. 1881 d. 1973)
Date: 1905
Dimensions: 83.75” x 90.25”
Medium: oil on canvas
Current location: National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Period: Modernism (Picasso’s Rose Period)
Genre: no traditional genre; history painting or group portraiture are the closest genres

Quick Notes:
  • The artist’s paintings from the Blue and Rose periods are populated by circus characters
    (or characters from the Commedia del’ Arte). Picasso empathized with these marginalized
    characters, as he was living a bohemian life himself.
  • The painting begs the viewer to interpret the relationships between the figures. Are they
    literally a family? Does the painting emphasize their emotional closeness or their distance?
  • The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke used this painting as the inspiration for the fifth of
    his ten Duino Elegies (1912-22).
             “But tell me, who are these vagrants, these even a little
              more transitory than we, these from the start
              violently wrung (and for whose sake?)
              by a never-appeasable will? But it wrings them,
              bends them, slings them and swings them,
              throws them and catches them; as if from an oily,
              more slippery air they come down [. . .]           translation by C.F. MacIntyre

Suggested Compare-Contrast Target:
  • Jean-Antoine Watteau, Gilles and Four Other Characters from the Commedia dell’Arte
    (Pierrot)

Writing Prompts:
  • Analyze the body language and gestures of the figures. What do we learn about the
    relationships between the figures from their body language?
  • What elements of this painting are typical of Picasso's Rose Period?



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Picasso Family of Saltimbanques