L’amour de Pierrot – Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904–1989). Public domain image, early 20th century.
Some paintings laugh softly into the grave. L’amour de Pierrot, painted by the young Salvador Dalí before his moustache had fully declared war on convention, is such a piece. At first glance, it’s all sweetness and sentiment: two lovers – Pierrot and Columbine, perhaps – seated in candlelit rapture, their hands entwined above the debris of champagne and evening wear. But as with all that glitters in this life, the shimmer conceals the skull beneath. Step back, and their devotion, their gaiety, their effervescent flirtation all resolve into the mocking oval of a death’s head.
It’s an image that Wilde himself might have adored, for it contains that contradiction he so relished – the romance of life twinned with the theatre of its inevitable decay. Dalí, even at this precocious stage, is playing the grand jester at the masquerade of existence. He offers us Pierrot, that eternal fool of love, who in chasing delight discovers only the grin of eternity staring back through the champagne bubbles. Every kiss is a countdown, every toast a toll of the bell.
The lovers sit in the very cavity of the skull they themselves compose – a neat visual paradox, a macabre waltz of eros and thanatos. The tablecloth becomes the jawbone, the glasses the teeth; the very act of dining becomes devouring. It’s a masterstroke of early surrealism, but more than that, it’s a philosophy painted in whispers. Love, Dalí suggests, is a form of consumption – one devours and is devoured, body and soul alike, until all that remains is the outline of what once laughed.
And yet, there’s tenderness here. The woman leans in, half-smiling, as though aware of her fate but willing it nonetheless. Pierrot, tragic clown of the heart, holds her hands with an expression of resigned bliss. Their ruffled collars and theatrical attire remind us that love itself’s a performance – a divine comedy that ends, invariably, in the same cosmic punchline.
Dalí’s genius lies not only in his draughtsmanship but in his moral mischief. He knows that beauty and horror are twins – that the skull and the face are the same structure seen from different sides of passion. He paints not death to frighten us, but to seduce us into awareness: that to live vividly is to die consciously.
If Wilde had seen L’amour de Pierrot, he might have declared it ‘a romance in requiem form.’ It’s love as illusion, intimacy as mirage, and mortality as the ultimate artist – sculpting from our laughter a skull that fits perfectly.
So let’s raise a glass, as the lovers do, to Dalí’s cruel little joke. May we drink to love, to loss, to the grand absurdity of it all – and to that final intimacy which waits, patient and smirking, in the mirror’s frame.
L’amour de Pierrot (c.1920) is one of Salvador Dalí’s earliest known works, created when the artist was still a student in Figueres. It reveals his fascination with the interplay between illusion and mortality long before his mature surrealist period. The double-image composition – lovers forming a skull – prefigures his later ‘paranoiac-critical method,’ through which Dalí sought to merge dream and reality into a single hallucinatory vision.
Wording 