Decadent Aesthetics and the Acrobat in French Fin De Siècle : Routledge : 9780367358143 : 036735814X : 04 Sep 2019 : In his discussion of clowns in nineteenth-century French painting from Jean-Léon Gérôme's 1857 La Sortie du bal masqué to Georges Rouault, art historian Francis Haskell wondered why they are so sad. The myth of the sad clown as an allegory for the unappreciated artist found echoes in the work of literary counterparts like Charles Baudelaire and his "Vieux saltimbanque" who seeks in vain a responsive public. For some, the attraction of the acrobatic clown for the creative imagination may have been his ability to embody the plight of the artist: these artistes generally led an ambulatory and uncertain existence. Other artists and writers, however, particularly the Decadents, perceived in the circus acrobat ? including the acrobatic clown ? a conceptual and performative tool for liberating their points of view from the prison-house of aesthetic convention. If authors' prota