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 masks of "commedia dell'arte", Pierrot now knew no national boundaries. Thanks to the international gregariousness of Modernism, he would soon be found everywhere. Pierrot played a seminal role in the emergence of Modernism in the arts. He was a key figure in every art-form except architecture. With respect to poetry, T. S. Eliot's "breakthrough work", "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), owed its existence to the poems of Jules Laforgue, whose ""ton 'pierrot'"" informed all of Eliot's early poetry. (Laforgue, he said, "was the first to teach me how to speak, to teach me the poetic possibilities of