Free spirits

‘Gypsies seem to have been born into the world for the sole purpose of being thieves,’ Cervantes begins his story of The Little Gypsy Girl. ‘They are born of thieving parents, they are brought up with thieves, they study in order to be thieves, and they end up as past masters in the art of thieving.’ But despite their thieving reputation, the bands of gypsy travellers who appeared in western Europe in the 1420s — from Egypt thought the English, from Bohemia thought the French — were a source of fascination. They came and went like the wind, they predicted the future and their costumes and dancing were the definition of exotic. Their appeal to artists was irresistible. They were painted by Caravaggio, Hals and de la Tour, and in 1621 Jacques Callot — who, legend had it, ran away aged 12 with a band of gypsies to Florence — recorded their free and easy lifestyle in a series of prints, warning, ‘You who take pleasure in their words, watch out for your linen, your silver and your pistols.’

Callot’s etchings are the earliest images in Bohemian Lights, the Spanish edition of an exhibition that recently arrived at the MAPFRE Foundation in Madrid from the Grand Palais in Paris. The show’s argument is an appealing one: that the modern myth of the artist as bohemian genius evolved out of the romantic idea of the gypsy as free spirit. In the 18th century, we see French and English painters still treating gypsies as exotic outsiders: fortune-tellers to fashionable ladies in the case of Watteau, picturesque wanderers on the earth in the case of Gainsborough. The revolution in perception comes with Courbet, who proclaims in 1853: ‘In our overcivilised society, I must lead the life of a savage …the great, wandering, and independent life of the gypsy.’