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. From monumental paintings to inexpensive tableware, from street theatre to prestige cinema, Pierrot recurs in diverse media through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Moving between historical marketplaces and theatrical repertoires, Pierrot and his world traces the career of this naïve buffoon from the art of Antoine Watteau to the cinema of Occupied France. Pierrot first draws attention to himself on the stages of the eighteenth-century Parisian fairs. Chosen by Watteau to play a key role in the artist's fêtes galantes , Pierrot then features in the consumable forms of the Rococo style. In the early nineteenth century, Watteau's large painting Pierrot is discovered at a bric-a-brac shop, a location reflecting the unique character of the post-Revolutionary marketplace. Fifty years later, Edouard Manet nods to this tale of Pierrot's discovery in his painting The Old Musician (1862). While Manet looked backwards, the photographer Nadar and his brother Adrien Tournachon launched a futuristic Pierrot in photographs displayed at the Exposition Universelle in 1855.

Nearly a century later, in Children of Paradise (1945), the ambivalent masterpiece of Occupation cinema, Pierrot is victimized by the ghost of an old-clothes seller. In vivid prose, this richly illustrated book locates Pierrot's enduring appeal in the frankness of his address to the viewer, whose attention he hails in the marketplace.