Printable sheet
Picasso harlequin in a checkered costume with a white ruff, hand on cheek beside a table with a cake. An easy art printable for kids; free PDF.
Printable sheet
Free for personal and educational use
Download PDFPrintA harlequin with a white ruff and checkered costume, two fingers on his cheek, his other arm on a table, a cake on a plate and flowers on the wall.
Fill the costume squares with two alternating bright colors, like red and blue.
Invent a circus character and draw a costume with your own pattern.
Picasso painted his young son Paulo dressed as a harlequin.
The Picasso harlequin is one of the characters that shows up most often in the artist's work. Harlequin comes from the commedia dell'arte, a lively style of Italian street theater that began in the 1500s, where masked actors made up funny stories on the spot in town squares and at fairs.
In those plays, Harlequin was a clever, mischievous servant who was always hungry and wore a costume sewn from colorful patches. Over time, the patches turned into the diamonds and checks we know today, and the character found a new home in circuses and carnivals across Europe.
Picasso painted harlequins throughout his long career. During his early years in Paris, he portrayed a thoughtful harlequin sitting at a café table. In his Rose Period, he filled his canvases with acrobats, tumblers and traveling circus families. Many experts believe Picasso saw something of himself in this character.
For a painter, the checkered costume was also a fun challenge, a chance to play with geometric shapes and color. That is why harlequins appear in both his realistic paintings and his cubist ones, always with a mood that feels half playful and half wistful.
