Doré was an accomplished acrobat, so when he read an account in the newspaper about a family of street performers whose child died after a fall, it’s no wonder that he made a couple versions of this scene. Here the deathly pale child is held in his mother’s arms recalling the Pieta, the scene from Christ’s life when his lifeless body is taken down off the cross and laid in the Virgin Mary’s lap. The father sits beside his wife and child looking incredibly sad – perhaps it was he who dropped the child. Beside the mother sits an owl looking away from the scene, suggesting that the parents have gone against wisdom and better judgement. On the ground below the mother’s feet there is a tarot card reading. She knew in advance what the outcome of the performance would be and yet she forced her child to do it anyway. About this painting Doré said “…[the child] is dying. I wished to depict the tardy awakening of nature in those two hardened almost brutalized beings. To gain money they have killed their child and in killing him they have found out that they had hearts.”
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Where is this painting located?
It’s currently lost unfortunately with many others as a part of this series
Literally the Denver Art Museum, it gets moved around a lot, right now it’s in the main gallery on the second floor.
I just realized, the version at the Denver Art Museum is an earlier version, where the father is in a teal costume instead of Red, and there’s nothing at the Mother’s feet, and no animals. Oops!
Denver Art Museum
it’s in the Roger Quilliot museum in Clermont-Ferrand France 🙂
If you look at DAM’s version, it’s quite different. The child has no blood on the hair, just bandages. The man and woman’s costume is different. There are no animals in DAM’s version. It seems to be a different version of the painting.
https://www.denverartmuseum.org/en/object/2012.4
Hi,
Gustave Doré did two painting of the theme : this one and an other darker. The darker one is in the Denver Museum, the lighter one (this) is in the Musée Roger-Quillot in Clermont-Ferrand.
One of them is in the Denver art museum
It’s pulls your heart out. A truly magnificent painting, I saw it yesterday, the tragedy is palpable.
I never saw this painting until today, it is deeply moving.
Actually it is not lost its in the Musee d’Art Roger Quilliot of Clermont Ferrand in France.