Pierrot [1883]; "The Painter Aman-Jean as Pierrot" [1883]), Léon Comerre ("Pierrot" [1884]), Henri Rousseau ("A Carnival Night" [1886]), Paul Cézanne ("Mardi gras [Pierrot and Harlequin]" [1888]), Fernand Pelez ("Grimaces and Miseries" a.k.a. "The Saltimbanques" [1888]), Pablo Picasso ("Pierrot and Columbine" [1900]), Guillaume Seignac ("Pierrot's Embrace" [1900]), and Édouard Vuillard ("The Black Pierrot" [c. 1890]). The mime "Tombre" of Jean Richepin's novel "Nice People" ("Braves Gens" [1886]) turned him into a pathetic and alcoholic "phantom"; Paul Verlaine imagined him as a gormandizing naïf in "Pantomime" (1869), then, like Tombre, as a lightning-lit specter in "Pierrot" (1868, pub. 1882). Laforgue put three of
Pierrot important factor that probably hastened his degeneration was the multiplicity of his fairground interpreters. Not only actors but also acrobats and dancers were quick to seize on his role, inadvertently reducing Pierrot to a generic type. The extent of that degeneration may be gauged by the fact that Pierrot came to be confused, apparently because of his manner and costume, with that much coarser character Gilles, as a famous portrait by Antoine Watteau attests (note title of image at right). But in the 1720s, Pierrot at last came into his own. Antoine Galland's final volume of The "Thousand and One