By Alexandros Dimiropoulos
A duel scene, on a winter morning, in a Masquerade ball…
Pierrot has been wounded, a man dressed as a French nobleman holds him and a Doge of Venice examines his wound. The winner dressed as an American Indian left his sword and walks away with a Harlequin…
Admittedly a strange scene….
A happy scene in theory (a Masquerade ball) and yet so dramatic. Even more strange is the fact that the main fighting has ended. It’s a very dramatic scene even though it doesn’t record the most intense moment of it (the fight) but the “moment immediately after”, as someone has mentioned before.
And probably this is a distinct feature of “The Duel After the Masquerade” and that is that makes you wonder what exactly is happening here, why is happening and why are all dressed like this. And this encourage the viewer to create with his imagination the preceding events.
The fight is over and all that is left is the dramatic outcome. And maybe in the end, even for a very intensive moment, when you see its outcome it becomes even more dramatic.
Jean-Léon Gérôme followed a similar motif to “The Duel After the Masquerade” in at least two other paintings: The Execution of Marshal Ney and The Death of Caesar, in which again he paints the moment immediately after the death of Michel Ney and Julius Caesar respectively.
In all these paintings you don’t know where to look at first. There are two points of interest, the wounded and the winner who walks away.
When this painting first appeared in an art exhibition in Paris (Salon), it was an immediate success and many left wondering about the event that triggered Gérôme’s imagination.
And even though I don’t know the answer to this, it seems probable that a connection exists with Gérôme’s teacher, the great painter Paul Delaroche. For example Delaroche’s painting “The Assassination of the Duke of Guise” (1834, Musee Conde, Chantilly) has a similar aesthetic.
Moreover, in the book “Representing the Past in the Art of the Long Nineteenth Century” has been mentioned that an older Delaroche’s painting, now lost, has a similar theme “Les Suites d’un Duel”. One may assume that Gerome maybe was aware of his teachers painting and maybe he paints what happened after the duel.
But that is just a hypothesis. The painting after it had been presented had an impact in other forms of art like theater and cinema. Below is a picture from a 1902 film “UN DUEL APRÈS LE BAL”:
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