Pierrot - 19th Century - Pantomime and Late 19th-century Art - France

France

Popular and literary pantomime

In the 1880s and ‘90s, the pantomime reached a kind of apogee, and Pierrot became ubiquitous. Moreover, he acquired a counterpart, Pierrette, who rivaled Columbine for his affections. (She seems to have been especially endearing to Xavier Privas, hailed in 1899 as the "prince of songwriters": several of his songs are devoted to her fortunes.) A Cercle Funambulesque was founded in 1888, and Pierrot (sometimes played by female mimes, such as Félicia Mallet) dominated its productions until its demise in 1898. Sarah Bernhardt even donned Pierrot's blouse for Jean Richepin's Pierrot the Murderer (1883).

But French mimes and actors were not the only figures responsible for Pierrot's ubiquity: the English Hanlon brothers (sometimes called the Hanlon-Lees), gymnasts and acrobats who had been schooled in the 1860s in pantomimes from Baptiste's repertoire, traveled (and dazzled) the world well into the twentieth century with their pantomimic sketches and extravaganzas featuring riotously nightmarish Pierrots. The Naturalists—Emile Zola especially, who wrote glowingly of them—were captivated by their art. Edmond de Goncourt modeled his acrobat-mimes in his The Zemganno Brothers (1879) upon them; J.-K. Huysmans (whose Against Nature would become Dorian Gray's bible) and his friend Léon Hennique wrote their pantomime Skeptical Pierrot (1881) after seeing them perform at the Folies Bergère. (And, in turn, Jules Laforgue wrote his pantomime Pierrot the Cut-Up after reading the scenario by Huysmans and Hennique.) It was in part through the enthusiasm that they excited, coupled with the Impressionists’ taste for popular entertainment, like the circus and the music-hall, as well as the new bohemianism that then reigned in artistic quarters like Montmartre (and which was celebrated by such denizens as Adolphe Willette, whose cartoons and canvases are crowded with Pierrots)—it was through all this that Pierrot achieved almost unprecedented currency and visibility towards the end of the century.

Visual arts, fiction, poetry, music, and film

He invaded the visual arts—not only in the work of Willette, but also in the illustrations and posters of Jules Chéret; in the engravings of Odilon Redon (The Swamp Flower: A Sad Human Head ); and in the canvases of Georges Seurat (Pierrot with a White Pipe ; The Painter Aman-Jean as Pierrot ), Léon Comerre (Pierrot ), Henri Rousseau (A Carnival Night ), Paul Cézanne (Pierrot and Harlequin ), Fernand Pelez (Grimaces and Miseries a.k.a. The Saltimbanques ), Pablo Picasso (Pierrot and Columbine ), Guillaume Seignac (Pierrot's Embrace ), and Edouard Vuillard (The Black Pierrot ). The mime "Tombre" of Jean Richepin's novel Nice People (Braves Gens ) 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 the "complaints" of his first published volume of poems (1885) into "Lord" Pierrot's mouth—and dedicated his next book, The Imitation of Our Lady the Moon (1886), completely to Pierrot and his world. (Pierrots were legion among the minor, now-forgotten poets: for samples, see Willette's journal The Pierrot, which appeared between 1888 and 1889, then again in 1891.) In the realm of song, Claude Debussy set both Verlaine's "Pantomime" and Banville's "Pierrot" (1842) to music in 1881 (not published until 1926)—the only precedents among works by major composers being the "Pierrot" section of Telemann's Burlesque Overture (1717–22), Mozart's 1783 "Masquerade" (in which Mozart himself took the role of Harlequin and his brother-in-law, Joseph Lange, that of Pierrot), and the "Pierrot" section of Robert Schumann's Carnival (1835). Even the embryonic art of the motion picture turned to Pierrot before the century was out: he appeared, not only in early celluloid shorts (Georges Méliès's The Nightmare, The Magician ; Alice Guy's Arrival of Pierrette and Pierrot, Pierrette's Amorous Adventures ; Ambroise-François Parnaland's Pierrot's Big Head/Pierrot's Tongue, Pierrot-Drinker ), but also in Emile Reynaud's Praxinoscope production of Poor Pierrot (1892), the first animated movie and the first hand-colored one. (View Poor Pierrot.)