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 appeared fairly regularly in English pantomimes (which were originally mute harlequinades but later evolved into the Christmas pantomimes of today; in the nineteenth century, the harlequinade was presented as a "play within a play" during the pantomime), finding his most notable interpreter in Carlo Delpini (1740–1828). His role was uncomplicated: Delpini, according to the popular theater historian, M. Willson Disher, "kept strictly to the idea of a creature so stupid as to think that if he raised his leg level with his shoulder he could use it as a gun." So conceived, Pierrot was easily and naturally displaced by the