Tableau vivant

Tableau vivant (plural: tableaux vivants), French for 'living picture', is a style of artistic presentation, often shortened to simply tableau. It most often describes a group of suitably costumed actors, carefully posed and often theatrically lit. By extension, it also applied to works of visual art including painting, photography and sculpture, featuring artists' models in similar arrangements, a style used frequently in the works of the Romantic, Aesthetic, Symbolist, Pre-Raphaelite, and Art Nouveau movements.

In the theatrical context, the actors/models do not speak or move throughout the duration of the display. The approach thus marries the art forms of the stage with those of the more static visual arts, and it has thus been of interest to modern photographers. The most recent heyday of the tableau vivant was the late 19th to early 20th centuries, during confluence of the above-mentioned art movements, and also featuring poses plastiques ('flexible poses') – virtually nude tableaux vivants – providing a form of erotic entertainment, both on stage and in print.

Occasionally, a Mass was punctuated with short dramatic scenes and painting-like tableaux. They were a major feature of festivities for royal weddings, coronations and royal entries into cities. Often the actors imitated statues of painting, much in the manner of modern street entertainers, but in larger groups, and mounted on elaborate temporary stands along the path of the main procession.

The history of Western visual arts in general, until the modern era, has had a focus on symbolic, arranged presentation, and (aside from direct personal portraiture) was heavily dependent on stationary artists' models in costume – essentially small-scale tableaux vivants with the artist as temporary audience. The Realism movement, with more naturalistic depictions, did not begin until the mid-19th century, a direct reaction against Romanticism and its heavy dependence on stylized tableau format.

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