Transformation scene a close with the suggestion of harmony restored. John Rich, earlier in the century, made Harlequin with his slap stick able to transform stage props; and later Joseph Grimaldi as Clown was in charge of transformations. Early pantomime related to and contained the traditional harlequinade by means of a transition in which a group of characters descended from the traditional types from the "commedia del arte" were transformed and "revealed" as being the key characters in the pantomime of the fairy tale that followed. A production in 1781 of "Robinson Crusoe" by Richard Brinsley Sheridan is credited with breaking down
Pierrot with the reigning American Realist and Naturalist aesthetic (though such figures as Ambrose Bierce and John LaFarge were mounting serious challenges to it). It is in fact jarring to find the champion of American prose Realism, William Dean Howells, introducing "Pastels in Prose" (1890), a volume of French prose-poems containing a Paul Margueritte pantomime, "The Death of Pierrot", with words of warm praise (and even congratulations to each poet for failing “to saddle his reader with a moral”). So uncustomary was the French Aesthetic viewpoint that, when Pierrot made an appearance in "Pierrot the Painter" (1893), a pantomime by Alfred