Why So Sad? Watteau's Pierrots

The reattribution to Antoine Watteau of The Italian Comedians acquired by the Getty Museum in 2012 prompts reconsideration of that artist's many renderings of Pierrot-a character he saw performed as a dim-witted bumbler in early eighteenth-century productions. When, in the following century, Pierrot was recast as forlorn, Watteau's best-known portrayal of him (now in the Louvre) was retroactively reread as both the prototypical sad clown-forebear to those of Honoré Daumier and Théodore de Banville-and a projection of its maker's malaise. Continued allegiance to these anachronistic assumptions unduly constrains imaginative engagement with the multidimensional Pierrots of Watteau's open-ended oeuvre.