@hollyr.eth
Framedl 2026-10-11 1/6*
Watteau's Pierrot, around 1718: a life-size clown in white satin, arms limp, staring straight out. Behind him his troupe goes on cavorting, the Doctor on a donkey, the rest mid-joke.
Generations have seen him as morose, the lonely sad clown. Art historian Donald Posner argues that's our invention: the melancholy Pierrot is a 19th-century persona. In Watteau's day he was a simpleton, the butt of the joke, not a man given to brooding.
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