Pierrot, a theatrical stock character known by his distinctive costume of loose white tunic and trousers, is a ubiquitous figure in French art and culture. This richly illustrated book offers an account of Pierrot’s recurrence in painting, printmaking, photography and film, tracing this distinctive type from the art of Antoine Watteau to the cinema of Occupied France. As a visual type, Pierrot thrives at the intersection of theatrical and marketplace practices. From Watteau’s Pierrot (c. 1720) and Édouard Manet’s The Old Musician (1862) to Nadar and Adrien Tournachon’s Pierrot the Photographer (1855) and the landmark film Children of Paradise (1945), Pierrot has given artists a medium through which to explore the marketplace as a form for both social life and creative practice. Simultaneously a human figure and a theatrical mask, Pierrot elicits artistic reflection on the representation of personality in the marketplace.

Robert Storey's lively and gracefully written study of Pierrot is the first scholarly history of this fascinating popular figure. Unlike previous studies of commedia dell'arte characters; this book focuses as much on Pierrot as a literary metaphor and mask as on the roles and dimensions of his stage character. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The book comprises of some dialogues between Pierrot and the three empiricists, Locke, Berkeley and Hume, and as Pierrot discusses with them about the empiricism of colour, and he contrasts his own views on colour and experience with the three empiricists separately. Firstly, there are six dialogues between Pierrot and the empiricists about colour and empiricism. And secondly I have written some dialogues of Plato and Aristotle, and as Empedocles, Democritus and Epicurus have much to say on physics and metaphysics. And because Plato and Aristotle both advocate metaphysics, and Empedocles, Democritus and Epicurus, the three of them advocate physics, and they reject metaphysics. And furthermore, Empedocles, Democritus, and Epicurus, the three of them would like to differ with Aristotle on the physics of the world.