Bouquet’s Le repas de Pierrot, Pierrot’s Dinner, suggests a picnic. The scene depicts the actor Jean-Gaspard Deburau as Pierrot, a star stock character in the Théâtre des Funambules (Theater of the Tightrope Walkers).
Pierrot always losses. From the look on his face, in this instance, he appears drunk. He sits spread-eagle, holding a bottle in his hand, looking nowhere, a second bottle empty and a third poking out of a basket. Behind Pierrot is a rustic stonewall, perhaps of a shed with a substantial trellis with flowering roses suggesting a lovers’ tryst. Alas, Pierrot waits alone. Except for the wine, the food seems untouched.
Bouquet may be memorializing Marie Antonin Carême, France’s most famous chef, who died in 1833.
The British Museum explains that Bouquet’s lithograph of Pierrot was first published in Revue des peintres (1834). Also, see Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s version of Pierrot’s loveless situation and Michel Carne’s film The Children of Paradise, Les enfants du paradis (1945).
See Auguste Bouquet. Le Repas de Pierrot [Pierrot’s Repast] (1834), lithography. The British Museum explains that Bouquet’s lithograph of Pierrot was first published in Revue des peintres (1834); Adriane Despot. “Jean-Gaspard Deburau and the Pantomime at the Théâtre des Funambules.” Educational Theatre Journal, 27, 3 (Oct. 1975); Also Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s Le pique-nique (1898)