The Proliferation of Periodicals

Before we can explore the political economy of Paris’s art world in the July Monarchy, we must first account for our access to an expanded critical discourse around its transformations. For some of the most significant changes that marked Louis-Philippe’s eighteen-year reign took place outside of Paris’s official art system. By the opening of the 1831 Salon, Paris’s pub lishing landscape, already ripe with pamphlet art criticism, was joined by a series of weekly periodicals dedicated exclusively to the arts and written explicitly for amateurs and practicing artists.¹⁷ These include the Journal des Artistes (1827), L’Artiste (1831), and the short-lived and radical La Liberté (1832). And cultural journalism was not the only arena in which periodical publishing expanded. The satirical periodical proliferated as a format for graphic satire during the July Monarchy. The landscape for graphic satire had already decisively shifted toward a more commercial popular audience. But the satirical periodical changed the frequency and regularity with which audiences might hear from their favorite illustrators. July Monarchy art-world graphic satire is thus by far the most prolific in my corpus with 254 images—almost half of the entire corpus. It is also the most quotidian in its subject matter, taking frequently for its subject the everyday lives of metropolitan Parisians.

Censorship law was an important factor in July Monarchy graphic satire’s preference for quotidian social subject matter. During the Restoration, Charles X’s strict July ordinances revoked the Restoration’s nominal liberty of the press. Upon his seizure of power in July 1830, Louis-Philippe d’Orléans reintroduced the liberty of publicly expressed opinions, which was enshrined in law on August 7, 1830, in the Constitutional Charter. However, in November 1830 and April 1831, Louis-Philippe passed laws similar to those covering lèse-majesté (treason), permitting the seizure of caricatures and the leveling of penalties against any who symbolically violated the king’s person, helping to explain why Louis-Philippe’s back is persistently the only one turned in his satirical representations and why he was so consistently represented as a pear.¹⁸ These restrictions passed from nominal to actual in 1835. Just a few months after an assassination attempt against Louis-Philippe by Giuseppe Marco Fieschi, a set of laws was passed that broadened existing censorship to include any allusion to foreign policy or domestic politics.¹⁹

Graphic satire was joined in this preference for the quotidian by the proliferation of a relatively new genre of short fiction that was derisively labeled “industrial fiction” by its detractors who loathed its commercialism, brevity, and serial or periodical publication. Taking our cue from Walter Benjamin, scholars now more neutrally label it “panoramic fiction.”²⁰ Panoramic fiction included works such as the popular physiologies pamphlets that parodied encyclopedic and taxonomic study by painting amusing, incisive, yet disordered and somewhat incoherent portraits of urban social types. This form of “sketch writing” offered a natural counterpart to its visual equivalent—graphic satire—and the two often appeared together from the same publisher.

In many ways, panoramic writing supplanted the popularity of vaudeville and opéra comique during the July Monarchy. Among twenty works of popular fiction discovered for this period, fourteen are works of fiction and only six of theater.²¹ Further, those six works of theater are concentrated between 1830 and 1838, after which point the baton was decisively passed to panoramic fiction and the Maison Aubert, Curmer, and Kugelmann publishers who produced the 1839–40 Le Musée pour rire (The laughter museum), the 1841–42 Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (The French painted by themselves), and the 1844 Les rues de Paris (The streets of Paris), respectively.

Many of these publishers were also leaders in the burgeoning world of the satirical periodical. Two men who would become Paris’s most important and prolific lithographic printers and publishers first signed their names to an 1829 lithographic album, jointly published with Martinet, and deposited on December 26, 1829: Charles Philipon and his brother-in-law, Gabriel Aubert.²² That same month, they and Marie-Françoise-Madeleine collaborated to form the Maison Aubert. Shortly thereafter, they founded France’s first weekly satirical periodical with a lithographic image included in every issue, La Caricature, as well as its first daily satirical periodical, Le Charivari.²³

We know little about what preceded these periodicals. Le Nain jaune was a short-lived pro-Bonapartist periodical that issued twenty-four-page octavos every five days with nine hand-colored satirical images once a month before its suppression in 1815. L’Homme gris of 1817 to 1818 published fifteen issues, half of which were destroyed for their seditious imagery of the “ruling orders.”²⁴ It was succeeded by Le Nouvel Homme gris of 1818 to 1819, which produced twenty-one issues with subversive pro-Bonapartist imagery.²⁵ Le Miroir and La Pandore regularly included lithographic illustration. They were the same periodical, but differently titled and succeeding one another: Le Miroir was published from 1821 to 1823, and La Pandore took its place in 1823, running until 1828.²⁶

Shortly before obtaining their lithographic printing brevet, the Maison Aubert began publishing Le Charivari, a more politically neutral satirical periodical intended to capture a broader market than La Caricature. Established in 1832, it was a four-page daily, one page of which included a full lithographic image that had text printed on the verso. As such, Le Charivari’s images were available to non-subscribers in the Maison Aubert print shop, where they were often repackaged through being retitled and bundled into new thematic series.²⁷ The Maison Aubert thus capitalized on two trends effective at exciting the avid collector: serialization and periodicity.²⁸

The categories of artist and lithographic illustrator thus experienced unprecedented overlap in the July Monarchy. No longer was the caricaturing sans souci separated into a distinct type. Rather, the tools and traces of lithographic illustration became a ubiquitous presence in art-world graphic satire. In 1829, the illustrator Jean Eloi Ferdinand Malenfant depicted lithography as an unfortunate but necessary component of the artist’s life in Songe Flatteur d’un peintre Romantique (Flattering Dream of a Romantic Painter, Figure 4.5). A well-dressed young painter abandons his small history painting to work on a lithographic illustration by candlelight. He falls asleep at his desk and dreams of working up his painting to its proper scale and receiving official accolades for it. The July Monarchy bohemian artist, however, reconciled to his fate, prepares what appears to be a lithographic copy of a portrait painting in the illustrious home of his nosy patron in Le Droit de Visite (The Right to Visit, Figure 4.6). This artist is not a prostituting portraitist, but a lithographic copiste (copyist) of another artist’s portrait. Resigned to his fate, his jaw locked, our bohemian artist in anachronistic and idiosyncratic dress suffers the nosy patron for, in his own home, the patron cannot be denied his droit de visite.

A Stagnating Salon System

Artists likely resorted to lithographic illustration as a reprieve from the cursus honorum bottleneck that the Salon exhibition was increasingly becoming. The Salon remained the gatekeeper and the perceived droit d’entrée to Paris’s art system though now presided over by the Académie des Beaux-Arts rather than the Directeur des Musées. When comparing almanacs of artists to those artists who exhibited at the Salon, we find that though this arts administration admitted more and more artists to each Salon, those artists refused by the Salon jury were unlikely to ever exhibit or even attempt to exhibit at another Salon.²⁹ The Salon exhibition could simply not keep pace with the rapid increase in artists seeking admission. In 1806, during the Empire, 85 percent of artists who submitted work had work shown (Table 4.1). This number stayed relatively stable until the devastating Salon of 1827, where only 59 percent of artists who submitted work had work shown. These numbers drastically improved in the Salon of 1831, which, in response to the petitions and recommendations of the July Monarchy’s periodical press, accepted 90 percent of artists’ works. By 1836, however, this number declined and by 1847—the last July Monarchy Salon—only 57 percent of artists who submitted works had works accepted.³⁰

Table 4.1. Artists with works submitted and accepted to the Salon exhibition (1806–47).

Echoing the Restoration artist A. Barincou, Eugène Le Poittevin, a landscape and maritime painter, satirized the Salon of 1833 for the cultural periodical L’Artiste (Figure 4.7). Whereas the July Monarchy’s first Salon accepted almost all artists who submitted, its second in 1833 admitted only 77.87 percent of artists. In Le Poittevin’s illustration 1833, a line of top-hatted artists and hired movers carry framed and packaged paintings, chasing after a devil who carries the Louvre Museum on its back, where the artists attempt to submit artworks to the Salon. They do not realize they are walking into a trap as a smaller devil holds a net they have all stepped in. Above them, the first unsuccessful artist has returned to his studio to burn his rejected artworks for warmth. Indeed, the Salon exhibition became a more regular setting for art-world satire, especially those images that echoed panoramic fiction and sought to depict typologies of artists, which we will revisit in greater depth below (Table 4.2).

Cailleux, in his “Rapport à M. l’Intendant général sur l’exposition” (“Report to Mr. General Intendent on the Exhibition”) for each Salon, revealed a different approach to the encouragement system conceived by Dominique Vivant Denon and instated by de Forbin. Cailleux repeatedly expressed his concern that artists too quickly abandoned their studies, eager to exhibit commercial genres at the Salon (por traiture, genre, landscape). This revealed that they treated art as a “moyen d’existence” (source of livelihood) instead of a vocation. He was even more concerned about what he perceived as a sense of entitlement that the state should reward these base priorities with medals or, in his words, “faire hon neur de sa médiocrité” (honor their mediocrity).³¹

Nonetheless, State support of the arts via the Liste Civile and the encouragements system attempted to keep pace with the growing number of artists who submitted artworks to the Salon. To the Musée des Artistes Vivants in the Luxembourg was added the Musée historique de Versailles (Historical Museum of Versailles), which opened in 1837 and continued to patronize leading history painters such as Horace Vernet.³² Denon and De Forbin’s encouragement system persisted at the Salon, doling out medals, making acquisitions, and issuing commissions. The percentage of artists exhibiting at the Salon who received medals averaged 8 percent in the Empire and Restoration. This average dropped to 5 percent in the July Monarchy.³³

The Artistic Aristocracy

Cultural critics writing for the aforementioned cultural periodicals made clear their discomfort with the extent to which artists’ fates were controlled by their entry to the Salon, thus revealing a lack of alternative exhibition spaces or options for commerce. In fact, writers characterized the art world as having been divided between an artistic aristocracy and, implicitly, a down-trodden proletarian community of artists, the former of which controlled the means of advancement. In 1832, Pétrus Borel called for the end of privileges and the “aristocratie dans les arts” (aristocracy in the arts), a cry that was repeated at the end of the July Monarchy in an 1847 letter by S.L. published in L’Artiste that bemoaned the unfair Salon admission system, which, the anonymous letter writer argued, favored “notre aristocratie artistique” (our artistic aristocracy).³⁴ Unresolved and indeed exacerbated during the July Monarchy, the perceived arbitrariness and incoherence of the jury’s choices were remarked upon and reviled, in particular during the Salons of 1840 and 1843, in which record low percentages of artists were admitted to the Salon.³⁵

The art system had reached an impasse. Growing numbers of artists submitted to the Salon, and though the Directeur des Musées continued to find space in the Louvre to accommodate greater numbers of works, they could not keep up with the growing numbers of submissions, so the quantity of refused artists and artworks increased faster than they could admit more artists. Since this system was so carefully designed to orbit around the Salon exhibition as a droit d’entrée to the art world, artistic renown, and com mercial success, few reliable alternatives existed for alternative exhibition and sale of artworks before 1848.³⁶ It is for this reason that the Salon was popularly referred to as a bazaar or marketplace—lamented by critics yet essential for the livelihood of artists.³⁷

Restricted access to showing work at the Salon, and to exhibition in general, prompted the publication of an 1847 pamphlet entitled De l’oppression dans les arts et de la composition d’un nouveau jury d’examen pour les ouvrages présentés au Salon de 1847 (On oppression in the arts and [on] the configuration of a new jury to examine works presented to the Salon of 1847). This pamphlet, penned by Louis Clément de Ris with the assistance of Honoré Daumier, the painter Auguste Jeanron (formerly of La Liberté), Fréderic Villot (of L’Artiste), and more, provided a succinct history of the Académie de Saint-Luc and Académie royale as oppressive ancien régime institutions only vanquished during the Revolutionary period during the triumph of the “artistes libres” and the Salons libres.³⁸ The pamphleteers argued that the July Monarchy restored the Académie royale of the ancien régime to its traditional domain of control by permitting the Académie des Beaux-Arts to preside over both the École des Beaux-Arts and the Salon exhibition. The authors, however, pointed out that the Académie royale numbered over a hundred at its 1793 suppression, whereas the Académie des Beaux-Arts represented a small fraction of this figure. It closed by declaring that “la majorité ne soit plus la victime de la minorité” (the majority will no longer be the victim of the minority), echoing previous complaints of an “artistic aristocracy.”³⁹ This pamphlet further allied itself with institutions that attempted to provide financial assistance and exhibiting opportunities to disenfranchised artists—the Société libre des Beaux-Arts, established in 1830, and the Union des Arts, established in 1844—with an announcement by Baron Taylor of the founding of another affiliated association.⁴⁰

Unsurprisingly, art-world satire cast the Salon’s jury as a new art-world antagonist. Jules Platier’s critiques of the jury of 1843 recycled the accusation of blindness used previously against La Font de Saint Yenne (Figure 1.8): the entire jury has their eyes covered and are led by guide dogs (Figure 4.8).⁴¹ Daumier’s contribution imagined the Académie des Beaux-Arts’s jury inundated by unqualified members of the Académie, namely musicians and architects (Figure 4.9). Most pay no attention at all to the submissions stacked up against the wall, and those that do interact with them do so within the prism of their own practices, playing music to and doing geometry before them. Daumier represents them as wealthy and erudite but aging and clueless.

Vertbleu’s 1840 caricature follows a similar approach (Figure 4.10). The erudite yet unqualified members of the Salon’s jury are incapable of understanding much less judging artwork as an artist would as they struggle to examine artworks with the tools of their vocations. Visual artists in Vertbleu’s image have escaped the meeting entirely, substituting their presence for easels adorned with aristocratic wigs. Further evidence of their class and aristocracy can be found in the Black North African aide who holds up paintings for the distracted jury, his legs shackled together and anchored by a ball.

The Growth of a Private Market for Art

The Salon jury was ridiculed in five images during the July Monarchy. But fifty-three images include bourgeois buyers, audiences, and critics, and thirty-four images satirize the vain and vulgar tastes of the bourgeois art buyer—a satirical type distinct from the connoisseurial antagonist of the ancien régime though certainly indebted to him. The private market for art blossomed as a necessary response to the inadequacy of the Salon system, but art-world satire was equally frustrated with the preferences of bourgeois buyers and proto-dealers such as Alphonse Giroux, Paul Durand-Ruel, Rittner and Goupil, and the Galerie Susse Frères for trafficking in items best described as objets de luxe or objets d’art within which fine art fit as a bien mobile—small and mobile easel paintings with no pre-determined destination or buyer. In a context such as this, creating artwork in itself became a speculative endeavor.

It is in these very terms that L’Artiste hesitantly celebrated the Galerie Susse Frères near the new stock market, which provided artists opportunities to earn money, but at the cost of blurring the lines between art and industry.⁴² After the patente debates of the French Revolution and the lengths to which commentators went to distance the visual arts from industry in order to argue for the distinction and exceptionality of the visual arts, by the July Monarchy, this distinction no longer seemed either apparent nor desirable. It is with cautious triumph that the writers of L’Artiste comment on the “rapprochement qui a commencé, depuis quelques années, à s’opérer entre les arts et l’industrie” (the merging that has commenced, in recent years, to take place between the arts and industry).⁴³ And leading among the phenomena they list as having contributed to this rapprochement is the development of what we now call galleries but which they referred to as “de Nouvelles maisons de commerce [ . . . ] qu’a pris le commerce des productions de la peinture moderne” (new trading houses [ . . . ] that have taken up the commerce of modern painting productions).⁴⁴

Artl@s’s Geographie du marché de l’art parisien (Geography of the Parisian Art Market) online interactive map reveals that, in 1815, there were thirteen vendors listed as “marchands de tableaux” (painting merchants) in Bottin de Commerce, mostly concentrated around the Louvre Museum, the opéra, and the stock market on the right bank, and near the École des Beaux-Arts on the left bank.⁴⁵ The Galerie Susse Frères, also near the Louvre, described itself as a “succursale du Salon du Louvre” (branch of the Louvre Salon [exhibition]), massaging the possible offense visitors might take at the commercial endeavor by pointing to the Salon exhibition as a model and by characterizing their institution as a continuation.⁴⁶ By 1830, the number of “marchands de tableaux” had nearly tripled at thirty-five and by 1848, it had more than doubled to eighty, again concentrated around the Louvre Museum, the opéra and the stock market, and the École des Beaux Arts, but also spreading further afield throughout the city of Paris.

Art-world satire responds by casting the bohemian buyer as a bumbling antagonist; a necessary but benign evil. Borrowing heavily from ancien régime and Revolutionary satires of the connoisseur, the bourgeois buyer is also often adorned with some kind of magnifying device. He hovers too close to the artist over whose shoulder he peers, peppering the artist with useless advice and superficial insights. In over a third of images ridiculing the bourgeois art buyer, he wields either a loupe or, in one case, a telescope to better scrutinize a nearby art object.⁴⁷

Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet’s 1840 lithograph La Vieille Aristocratie (The Old Aristocracy) shows a man of inherited wealth visiting the studio of a painter who has paused his work on a medium-sized military painting to permit a prospective buyer to scrutinize it (Figure 4.11). The prospective buyer’s wealth is flagged by his aide—a finely dressed Black man who carries, presumably, bags of money. Similarly, Charles Joseph Traviès’s 1837 contribution to the Galeries Physiognomique series shows an Habitué des ventes publiques (Public auction regular) who peers at a small painting through a jeweler’s loupe (Figure 4.12). His entire body is contorted by his myopic gesture. His cane and top hat are precariously perched between his legs, his back is hunched and his topcoat wrinkled as he shrinks himself in a physical parallel of his gaze. His face is particularly distorted. He clenches one of his eyes shut so incredibly tightly that his brow and his cheek have been recruited to assist from above and below, the former furrowing, the latter scrunching, transforming his mouth into a monstrous gaping hole.

Other images rehearse the strategies of Charlet and Traviès’s images but further mock the judgment and the intentions of the bourgeois buyer, questioning whether their intentions are purely aesthetic. An anonymous 1840 lithograph published by Aaron Martinet shows a collector—of antiquities, furniture, armor, prints and drawings, and North African decorative arts—who wields his loupe to scrutinize a statuary fragment (Figure 4.13). His lips purse and his eyebrows raise in titillation—a cue taken by the image’s coloriste who paints the bourgeois connoisseur with blushing cheeks. For what he scrutinizes so closely is an ephebic and androgynous posterior.

The bourgeois buyer as antagonist goes beyond jokes about myopia and sexual titillation. Under the lithographic crayon of Paul Gavarni, Daumier, Charlet, and Platier, the eccentric artist’s poverty forces him to prostitute his brush to ignorant bourgeois patrons. The trope of the prostituting portraitist, finely dressed and happily painting supposedly undeserving bourgeois patrons, was replaced by the bohemian painter reluctantly suffering the company of ignorant and insulting bourgeois buyers. For instance, journalist and author Maurice Alhoy criticized the bourgeois patron for his ignorance and vanity throughout Le Musée pour rire (1839). For Alhoy the bourgeois patron had a negative impact on the arts in France. The bourgeois patron was responsible for the large number of por traits shown at the Salon exhibition because, he argued, the bourgeoisie were vain and desired the social accolades that came with being able to say they were on display.⁴⁸ Though the bourgeois patron was the natural enemy of the bohemian artist, that same artist relied on him for material well-being.⁴⁹ The bourgeoisie were “sur terre pour faire le désespoir de l’artiste” (on earth to make artists hopeless).⁵⁰

Gavarni, in his 1838 series “Les Artistes,” imagines the awkward commercial exchanges between young, scruffy bohemians and the bourgeois class comprised of bureaucrats, bankers, and administrators whose mores were ill-suited to accepting the loose, disheveled lifestyles of Paris’s young eccentric painters.⁵¹ For instance, a patron who has respectfully removed his top hat struggles to enter the studio of a painter in ill-fitted clothing because the large history painting he is working on blocks the front door (Figure 4.14), or a smartly dressed middle-aged patron skeptically eyes a large portrait as the painter, without decorum, slouches in his chair, unknowingly insulting the sitter (Figure 4.15).

Bourgeois buyers lusted after the approval of the artist, who had the power to legitimize the bourgeoisie’s bid for social elevation. But a subset of July Monarchy images feature “lowly” artisans who look down on the artist, the latter of whose material well-being is in fact far more precarious than theirs. For instance, in an 1839 print by Platier, a baker makes off with an image he has purchased but insults the painter on the way out, accusing him and other artists of prolifically producing croûtes: “Le pain peut devenir rare [ . . . ] mais la croûte ne manquera jamais. . . . Quand la disette sera chez les boulangers, on fera queue à votre porte.” (Bread could become rare [ . . . ] but crusts will never run out. . . . When a period of scarcity strikes bakers, we will line up at your door).⁵² In an 1835 lithograph by Jules-Joseph Bourdet (Figure 4.16), a baker visits the studio of an eccentrically dressed and coiffed painter whose regal contrapposto stance betrays his grandiosity. The baker is presumably making his morning rounds and, after depositing a hefty loaf at the bedraggled studio of our bohemian painter, remarks that the painter “faites toujours des croûtes” (is always making crusts).

Art-world satire around the July Monarchy regularly played with these contrasts: audiences who should be respectful and deferential provide invasive advice to the painter, their presumed “better,” or bourgeois connoisseurs incapable of recognizing the distinction between fine art and fine artisanship attempt to provide aesthetic critique to laborers, such as the ruddy door painter in Edmé Jean Pigal’s 1824 image (Figure 3.11). Satirists imagined a variety of scenarios for this discordance, designed to spotlight the bourgeois buyer’s classlessness and vulgarity. In an 1840 image, also by Platier, a bourgeois connoisseur peers over the shoulder of a long-haired bohemian, bemoaning that he did not pursue his amateur interest in painting and insinuating that he could have been equally as talented as the painter he has visited (Figure 4.17). In an anonymous 1840 contribution to a lithographic series titled Souvenirs d’Atelier (Studio Memories), a fashionable bourgeois patron criticizes an artist who has failed to paint him in as flattering a light as he would prefer.⁵³ In Hippolyte Bellangé’s 1832 Les Importuns (Figure 4.18), the artist is again bombarded by the improprieties of his nouveau riche bourgeois buyer who, having arrived at the studio with a fashionable posse, including his young child, scrutinizes a larger-than-life religious painting, his elbow clearly leaning against the canvas, as he and his wife ask questions such as: “qu’est ce que ça représente!” (what does this depict!) and “Qu’est ce que ça peut avoir de hauteur” (What height could this be) from her, “c’est à l’huile n’est ce pas monsieur? . . . comme ça sent fort!” (it’s in oils isn’t that right sir? . . . how it is smelly!) The artist is forced to suffer these indignities, incapable of paying his meager rent for his meager studio by any other means.

In these images, the bourgeois patron cannot conceal that he is interested in these paintings not for their aesthetic value, but because the portraiture flatters him or because the painting is fashionable and will make suitable decoration for his home. The bohemian artist begrudgingly but quietly accepts these improprieties from his sitter, dependent as he is on their patronage. This dependence is visualized by Gavarni’s bohemian, who desperately calls upon his bourgeois patron attempting to seek overdue payment for a painting he pro duced.⁵⁴ These images highlight the inherent paradoxes of an art system that operates on the principals of competitive individualism in a capitalist market: since their wealth comes from commerce, those capable of buying are likely to treat art objects as commercial objects. The art world’s pretense that fine art is non-commercial and anti-economic is constantly undermined by the dominance of the bourgeois buyer in art-world satire.

In one of Daumier’s 1846 contributions to the Les Bons Bourgeois series, an artist hosts a studio visit with a prospective buyer who measures paintings with his walking stick to ascertain which paintings will fit in his house (Figure 4.19). He picks one that pleases him but demands it “a une demi canne de moins” (minus a half a walking stick). Charlet attempted a similar joke in his 1840 Un Mécène (Figure 4.20). Our eclectically dressed painter who dons a fez accommodates a visit from a well-coiffed (and potentially mixed race) bourgeois buyer. Our caption indicates that the bourgeois guest bombards the painter with precise and mundane requirements for the “petit tableau meublant” (little furniture-like painting) he plans to buy: it must be delivered by the end of the month; it must be one meter, twenty-two centimeters, by ninety-five centimeters, and so on. Turned attentively toward his buyers, our painter sneaks a glance out of the picture frame at the viewer, asking us to share in his silent but burning frustration at the commercialization of his trade. Indeed, recalling France’s 1777 creation of the category of the artiste libre, paintings created au toisé or by the unit were listed as inarguable proof that the artist was in fact a commercial artist and was not deserving of the title of artiste libre.

The Ambivalence of Art-World Satire

In response to a stagnating and centralized art system that had deftly excised artists from arts administration and concentrated opportunities for advancement in public hands without being able to adequately match the growing numbers of artists flocking to Paris, the Parisian art world found itself increasingly subject to accusations of having fostered an artistic aristocracy. And these accusations were especially biting in France at a time when the memory of the French Revolution and the shadow of its unactualized potential loomed larger and larger across the 1830s and 1840s. In the spirit of the French Revolution, July Monarchy artists could not and would not imagine a return to the corporate system and its guilds and academies, although such a return might have responded to many of these problems, allowing artists to have autonomy over the administration of their own corporate institutions, and more tightly controlling and supporting those artists active within a political region. Rather, Republican artists formed associations to provide mutual aid and produced radical writing in a growing number of artists’ periodicals where they employed the proto-socialist language of labor increasingly mobilized in the lead up to 1848. Radical Republican publications encouraged artists to identify with and as artisans or workers rather than members of an atomized vocation.⁵⁵

July Monarchy art-world satire’s construction of the inglorious artist echoes these preoccupations, but also complicates and nuances them. Satirists drew upon an already extremely rich visual language for satirizing the arts that had been built up over the course of decades to voice concerns about the artist’s material well-being and his vulnerability to the commercial prostitution of his profession, and to encourage artists to identify with and as workers and artisans. But conflicting stances emerged regarding whether or not the artist’s proletarianization had revolutionary potential or whether it represented a bastardization of the artist’s genius. Identifying with industry and commerce could represent a broader social gain but at the cost of what was an age-old tendency to distinguish art from commerce in order to argue for its status as a liberal art.

The Poor Artist Vacillates between Delusion and Disillusion

In July Monarchy theater and popular fiction, the noble, poor artist of previous periods almost vanished entirely. The artists who replaced them were invariably poor but more desperate than noble. They varied primarily in their understanding of this poverty and destitution: is it in the service of something attainable or beyond reach? The disillusioned poor artist was unconvinced that they would eventually attain glory, and they were shakier in their conviction that their refusal to prostitute their work was a noble act. This character type was echoed satirically in the delusional artist who still believed in glory despite his poverty. The delusional artist was generally rendered more comedically and less sympathetically than the disillusioned one.

In early July Monarchy popular theater, artists were reduced to comical and youthful drunkards, as is the case in Dorvigny et Lantara (1831), where the eighteenth-century Lantara character reappears, or in Les débardeurs ou L’Atelier, le bal et l’étude (1844), where artistic careers are barely discussed, nor is the traditional romantic plot arc presented where two young lovers overcome obstacles to be together.⁵⁶ Though poverty is of course an ever-present and indeed foundational element of the bohemian lifestyle, in response to a growing general interest in the carefree and vivacious sociability of young artists, both plays present audiences with lively cabaret and ball scenes.

The axiomatic nature of the artist’s poverty is especially significant: it is generally presented as a given that the artist is poor, and this is reinforced in just a line or two within each play. For the first time, however, we begin to encounter artists who are disillusioned. Their faith that one must suffer poverty in order to achieve artistic glory visibly flags. In Le Rapin, Scènes d’atelier (1836), for instance, the studio’s artists pause to reflect on the occasional need to produce lesser, but more popularly appealing artwork to make ends meet. The artists suggest they should proudly sign those works that will bring them renown and avoid signing those produced just for survival.⁵⁷ Similarly, in Le Modèle, Croquis d’atelier (1831), the protagonist Eugène Valin opens the play by renouncing art-making, concluding that it costs too much to achieve glory:

Ah! C’en est fait, je renonce à la gloire;

Pour l’obtenir, on court trop de hasards:

A ce vain mot, non, je ne veux plus croire.⁵⁸

[Ah! It is done, I renounce glory;

To obtain it, we take too many chances:

In this pointless word, no, I no longer want to believe.]

When the artist’s poverty is axiomatic, it is generally age rather than poverty that provides the punchline. For instance, an anonymous 1830s series called Tableau des Vicissitudes de la Fortune (Picture of Fortune’s Vicissitudes) published by Charles Engelmann showcases creative trades, juxtaposing the successful and the unsuccessful. For the Lithographe and Sculpteur categories (Figures 4.21 and 4.22), we find a young, handsome artist on the right at the tender age of twenty. The lithographer is an illustrator who happily sharpens his crayon, exclaiming “Je veux les surpasser tous!” (I want to surpass them all!), and the sculptor chips away at a statue, asserting that “Je serai de l’Institut” (I will be of the Institut). Reading these images left-to-right, the viewer first stumbles upon the sixty-year-old artists in the same fields as their younger, hopeful counterparts to the right. The grizzled and disgruntled lithographer justifies his lowly work, reduced to simply graining the lithographic stones to prepare them for new illustrations, saying “Il faut vivre” (One must live). Meanwhile, an equally elderly sculptor wearing wooden shoes now makes sabots and wooden wig heads for a living. The aspiring fine artists have ultimately ended up as ouvriers (laborers).

The series’s overall premise is that some artists, whether journalists or actors, are successful while others perish. The lithographer in particular has a different fate forecasted. Behind the hopeful twenty-year-old lithographic illustrator, we find an illustration of the seventeenth-century fable by Jean de la Fontaine of “La laitière et le pot au lait” (“The dairy farmer and the pot of milk”). In this image, the farmer carries her pot of milk to market and dreams of the many things she will buy with it. However, when we pan over to the sixty-year-old lithographic grinder, the laitière has now dropped her pot of milk on the ground, shattering it precisely because she neglected to watch her step as she dreamt about her future. Raffet’s frontispiece to his 1832 album pictures the aging lithographic illustrator similarly (Figure 4.23). He wears a cap in his mansarde to keep himself warm, is missing teeth, and has a wrinkled, angular face and angry eyebrows. His pot-au-feu has been transformed by an evil spirit and out of it pours a set of lithographic albums. The impoverished artist must pander to popular tastes in order to feed himself to the detriment of his career and artistic output.

This juxtaposition between the delusional enthusiasm of youth and the realities foisted on us by age reappears in Clément Pruche’s 1837 lithograph where a young, eccentric artist stops in the street to have his shoe shined by an older, disheveled, and weathered man who pauses to warn the artist that since he has abandoned form for color, the arts eventually “feront diablement user de chaussures!” (will devilishly use up his shoes!, Figure 4.24). The quill in the décrotteur or shoe shiner’s hat suggests that he was formerly a writer. He occupies the same role of foreboding forecast as the elderly artists did for the optimistic young artists of the Tableau des Vicissitudes de la Fortune.

This juxtaposition of youth to age is accompanied by another important visual difference reminiscent of Empire to Restoration graphic satire: the handsome, plump, and healthy young noble artist is juxtaposed to a ruddy, grizzled, bedraggled older one. Again, the visual language of the peuple is rehearsed in what Georges Vigarello has called a “grammar of appearances” in which the early nineteenth-century peuple are ruddy, hunched, drab, emaciated, and worn, bearing the visual markers of their class.⁵⁹ In this way, satirists constructed “before” and “after” parallels of a regression from, rather than a progression toward, the nobility of artistic practice. Through the visual language of what they considered ugliness, they visualized a process of proletarianization where the artist becomes peuple.

The Last of Monsieur Crouton

Carrying the banner of artist as monstrous peuple, Monsieur Crouton reappeared in 1837 in the play Crouton chef d’école, ou Le Peintre véritablement artiste (Crouton master of a school [of painting], or The Painter veritably an artist).⁶⁰ The story and character echoes the Crouton of 1814: Monsieur Crouton is a shop sign painter who aspires to renown and glory as a painter of fine art. Through some kind of mix up, he fleetingly scales the cursus honorum by gaining admission to the Salon exhibition. The Monsieur Crouton of 1837, also a shop sign painter, thus rehearses the story arc of the 1814 Monsieur Crouton, to which is added a much more extensive chain of events following his erroneous moment of glory.

The later Monsieur Crouton believes that his painting has been admitted to the Salon by the jury, and further still, that it is a great success and is applauded by the public. From there, the following ensues: an art amateur named Stupidorff hopes to buy artwork from Crouton and enthusiastically offers to purchase all of his shop signs; the Minister of the Interior invites Crouton to dinner; waves of young students arrive at Crouton’s studio and desire to be trained by him; and these students organize a triumphal procession for him complete with laurels, palms, and music.⁶¹ In the end, it is revealed that the painting believed to be Crouton’s, since it is signed with his name, is actually a painting by Crouton’s studio hand Colibri. It was only signed “Crouton” as a cruel and jealous joke by Colibri’s former art instructor Girodet, who was referring not to the character Crouton but to the general type of the “crouton”: an artist who makes croûtes or worthless works of art.⁶² Further, the amateur Stupidorff is revealed to be a local fool only barely aware of the generous offers he has made Crouton and certainly incapable of following through on them. It is fruitful to compare the early and late Crouton plays. Both Croutons aspire to be a fine artist but do not paint with enough nobility and elevation, nor in the correct genre. They are pretenders, all intentions with no follow-through but, in the absence of any form of official feedback beyond Salon admission, incapable of recognizing their own charlatanry.

Shop Sign Painters and the Confusing Cursus Honorum

Though the Monsieur Crouton character enjoyed this one last glorious gasp on stage, he cannot be found in satirical imagery in the July Monarchy. References to croûtes and to bad artists as Croutons abound, but Crouton as a distinct type—a delusional shop sign painter—disappeared. Important elements of the type formerly known as Crouton survive, notably the trope of the shop sign painter, which is appropriated in the Republican satirical press to more directly critique the unattainability of the cursus honorum. Restoration imagery lead in representations of the artist as a shop sign painter with thirteen satires that depict him as such, whereas the July Monarchy only saw this trope rehearsed in five images. In the July Monarchy, the fine artist forced to resort to shop sign painting is a disillusioned, disgruntled, often alcoholic, and always emaciated and weathered figure who bemoans that his careful study and toil for accolades has earned him nothing but the pursuit of a (presumably ignoble) trade.

Honoré Daumier’s aforementioned 1843 representation of a shop sign painter visualizes the above quite pointedly (Figure 4.2). A middle-aged painter stands in the street at the base of a ladder. An elder bohemian, disheveled with idiosyncratic pinstriped pants peaking out below his crumpled smock, his face is contorted with anger at his situation. It is also contorted with the physiognomic signifiers of his status as peuple-artiste: his eyelids are heavy with puffy bags below them; his nose is bulbous and red; his marionette lines are pronounced on his gaunt, wrinkled face; and his mouth, opened as he speaks, gapes to one side. Standing in contrapposto, he gestures upward to the shop sign he has painted as an audience gathers in the street to appreciate his masterpiece. The caption tells us what he declares to us, his audience: “Désillusion! Et dire que j’ai passé quinze ans de ma vie à copier la jambe de l’Apollon du belveder [sic] pour arriver à peindre un pain de sucre sur l’enseigne d’un épicier! . . . . . . . j’espérais grimper autrement au sommet de l’échelle sociale. . . . . (Disillusion! And to think I spent fifteen years of my life in copying the leg of the Apollo Belvedere to end up a painter of sugar bread for the shop sign of a grocer! . . . . . . I had hoped to climb to the summit of the social ladder otherwise. . . . .). Indeed, the disillusioned shop sign painter’s classical training is so deeply engrained in his being that he unknowingly mimics the pose of the Apollo Belvedere himself.

The year before, Jules Platier rehearsed similar themes in his 1842 contribution to the series Revue Comique (Figure 4.25). His shop sign painter works on lettering on a scaffold with a bottle of wine next to him, dressed in the idiosyncratic costume emblematic of July Monarchy bohemia. A bit younger than Daumier’s shop sign painter, Platier’s is nonetheless endowed with the physiognomic traits that would categorize him as peuple-artiste, with his wrinkled forehead, his furrowed brow so pronounced that it rests on his hooked nose, and his lower lip jutting out in front of a receding chin. The image’s caption reads “Un monsieur qui cultive les belles lettres” (A gentleman who cultivates belles-lettres). A year apart, Platier and Daumier made startlingly similar jokes that played upon the same juxtaposition: the fine artist wastes his intellectually and culturally erudite training on thoughtless and banal commercial art and their appearance contorts to mimic that of the laboring and liminal classes to whom their labor has spiritually likened them.

The shop sign painter’s shrinking popularity in July Monarchy art-world satire was likely due to the semantic drift of the trope. In the Restoration, as we saw, the shop sign painter trope was sometimes mobilized to express anxieties about the category of the artiste libre and those practitioners endeavoring to join the ranks of fine artist without a grasp on the nature of the category. Other times, the trope was used to highlight the destitution of promising artists who were unable to find patrons or sell their work. The July Monarchy shop sign painter became a subsidiary to a larger category: those artists who have failed to “scale the ladder,” to borrow from Daumier. They followed the steps dictated by the cursus honorum but failed to succeed in an art system where the pathway to success was unclear, narrow, and restricted.

July Monarchy theater and imagery regularly expressed broad and serious doubts about whether the cursus honorum could actually be scaled by passing through the thresholds of its various gatekeepers—namely through winning prizes and contests, and Salon admission. This doubt was expressed more frequently by our disillusioned artists who proclaimed that winning the listed achievements actually yielded no further gains. For instance, in Le Rapin, Scènes d’atelier, the young students training in the studio (rapins) lust after exhibition in the Salon, but they all admit that “ça ne nourrit pas . . . la gloire!” (It does not feed one . . . glory!).⁶³ Lottin de Laval underlines this point in his contribution to Les rues de Paris (1844) when he says “la misère tue et n’inspire pas!” (misery kills at does not inspire!)⁶⁴ These are remarkable departures from Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s late eighteenth-century conviction that the artist’s struggle is a necessary condition of his glory since it signals a refusal to prostitute to commercial and luxe genres.

These same sentiments are echoed more forcefully in a small set of images that, like A. Barincou’s Restoration lithographs, attack the false promises of the cursus honorum with surgical precision. The Salon, in particular, is represented as an event to which crowds of desperate artists submit rushed artworks that are likely to be rejected, for instance in Le Poittevin’s aforementioned satire, 1833 (Figure 4.7). This theme is reprised in Daumier’s 1846 Le Dernier Jour de la Réception des Tableaux, where a crowd of artists queue to submit their paintings to the Salon. An eccentric, long-haired artist in an unusual hat who has forgotten his coat at home has his palette and brush out and finalizes his painting as a hired mover carries it on his back (Figure 4.26). An 1847 image signed “R.J.” pictures an artist who has arrived to submit their work Cinq minutes trop tard (Five minutes too late).⁶⁵ Several more images capture the experience of rejection: Gavarni’s two flamboyantly dressed artists excoriate the Salon exhibition in an 1839 image while admitting that neither has had any works accepted to it, while in an 1840 image, an artist illustrated by Daumier destroys a paint ing that has been refused by the Salon jury.⁶⁶

The cursus honorum is also visualized more abstractly, with careful attention paid, again, to discrepancies in age. Daumier’s 1842 image Les Illusions d’Artistes—Les Grands Prix shows a variety of middle-aged artists—a composer, a painter, and an architect—milling about with laurels on their heads (Figure 4.27). The subtitle, “Tous rêvent les honneurs, la gloire, l’Immortalité” (All dream of honors, glory, Immortality), helps to explain why they mill about with the Institut de France as backdrop, just across the Seine from the Louvre Museum. Evidently, their goal is to join the ranks of the former’s immortalized membership. As in the Tableau des Vicissitudes de la Fortune, the dreams of the young or, in this case, middle-aged, are dashed twenty years later. The lengthy and revealing caption, characteristic of 1840s graphic satire generally and Daumier’s image production in particular, suggests that each of these artists will be reduced to ignoble applications of their skills in their old age and will be forced to produce the most commercial and base manifestations of their artistic production: the painter will produce shop signs, the musician will produce popular dance music, the sculptor will produce ceramic garden ornaments, and the architect will make Quixotic Spanish castles. In all these cases, the aspiration to achieve artistic glory is satirized but not necessarily because the desire is in itself risible, but because the likelihood of attainment is so minuscule. Already, by the July Monarchy, art-world satire found the odds of achieving success and glory about as arbitrary, unlikely, and unpredictable as we would today esteem winning the lottery.

In general, the deus ex machina that ran rampant in ancien régime through Restoration popular theater disappeared almost entirely in the July Monarchy. The 1836 Le Rapin, Scènes d’atelier is the last of this corpus to sincerely present us with any deus ex machina at all. A young aspiring painter’s problems vanish after a sudden miraculous turn of events—offstage, he is awarded a Prix de Rome.⁶⁷ In contrast, Crouton’s 1837 faux-victory in Crouton, chef d’école does not actually perform the function of the deus ex machina. Rather, it parodies the biographical and theatrical trope of the deus ex machina in itself, subverting the very notion that any artist can be so easily elevated to new echelons of success and renown. July Monarchy art-world satire’s stance on the cursus honorum is, essentially, that it no longer functionally exists. Its disappearance, however, is not grieved. Art-world satire responds to the ideological investment in the meritocratic assumptions that underpin the cursus honorum with a wry roll of the eyes.

The Bohemian Artist

From the Battle of Hernani (February 28, 1830) onward, the bohemian writer, artist, and musician emerged as part of an increasingly visible subculture in urban Paris.⁶⁸ Bohemianism, though rarely so labeled in the period, found its ironic manifestation in image and text most markedly in the July Monarchy. Satirical imagery increasingly depicted artists as youthful, strangely groomed with long hair and facial hair, and eclectically dressed in anachronistic hats and orientalist house coats, or wearing painter’s smocks in public. However, the appearance of these artists was mocked in relatively few images though their eccentricity certainly played a role in augmenting this imagery’s humor and legibility.

In those cases where bohemian artists were ridiculed for their appearance, they were accused of privileging style over substance, or in the words of Vincent Laisney, for prioritizing art après tout (art after all) instead of the inverse, art avant tout (art before all).⁶⁹ For instance, in Maurice Alhoy’s piece of short fiction “Causerie Artistique” (1839), two artists criticize the bourgeoisie and herald the artist as “le Juif errant moderne” (the modern wandering Jew).⁷⁰ Each proclamation celebrating their carefree and liminal lifestyle, their “double nature, notre multiple essence” (double nature, our manifold essence) is counter-balanced with an admission of their poverty and especially their reliance upon the bourgeoisie. For instance, they mention that their rent is unattainable, and they conclude their conversation by agreeing to visit a bourgeois (whom they loathe) around dinner time so that he will offer to feed them free of charge. Alhoy’s story is accompanied by a lithograph by Paul Gavarni that shows a pair of eccentrically dressed, emaciated, and quite hirsute artists who sit and chat, leaning on their portfolios as they admire a landscape that they were presumably supposed to be studying and drawing (Figure 4.28).⁷¹ Similarly, in an image like the 1839 Les Génies méconnus (the unsung Geniuses), a cénacle of artists lounge in disgruntled silence in their salon, surrounded by artwork and festooned with the accoutrements of their intellectually distinct lifestyle (Figure 4.29). They accomplish nothing and are overpowered by their malaise as they bemoan the fact that they have not yet achieved renown and glory.

The July Monarchy bohemian is a marginalized figure, but in art-world satire, only depicted as a white man. Women artists figure equally rarely in July Monarchy art-world satire as they did in the Empire and Restoration and their appearances are minimized in near identical ways.⁷² Either a distraction to serious male artists or the butt of a propriety joke, very few women are represented as independent artists. Where they do appear, they are caricatured quite differently from their Imperial and Restoration antecedents, adopting the physiologies of the bas bleus—in the hands of Daumier, they are homely women, flat-chested, swaddled in clothes and with hairstyles that age them, and bespeckled to indicate their unfeminine intellectual proclivities (Figure 4.30).⁷³ Other races do not appear in art-world satire of this period save for people of African descent who figure only as servants and aides, holding paintings and otherwise assisting wealthy painters or members of the Institut de France—representatives of the artistic aristocracy. They stand in exclusively as signifiers of wealth and, interpreted charitably, the inclination to exploitation that accompanies such power.

Painters in Name Alone: Charlatans, Sans Souci, and the Rapin

The lazy bohemian is eclipsed in quantity by the lazy art student, labeled the rapin, in July Monarchy image and text. The charlatan and sans souci type that we have already discussed began to merge with this new type. The rapin was often the newest and youngest art student in a studio setting who was also, ostensibly, the laziest, most rebellious, and least talented. July Monarchy imagery suggests that by adopting the title of aspiring artist, young men gained access to a liminal and unsupervised lifestyle that enabled laziness and womanizing. Generally, they were accused of avoiding commitments, both financial and romantic.⁷⁴

The rapin was briefly mentioned in the 1823 L’Atelier de peinture as an insult meant for the newest and laziest student in the studio.⁷⁵ This type reappeared with force in the 1830s: in the 1836 play Le Rapin, Scènes d’atelier, and in short fiction by Louis Huart entitled “Le Rapin” (1839) and by Jacques-Germain Chaudes-Aigues in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (1841).⁷⁶ In Le Rapin, Scènes d’atelier, the rapin, named Pingot, is the antagonist and attempts to lure the protagonist’s love away from him. As the rapin, it is written in the studio’s rules that he has additional modeling and domestic duties that he performs poorly and vindictively.

Huart describes the rapin type as a youth—eighteen to twenty-five years old—who dresses eccentrically with long, unkempt hair. He is completely oblivious to politics, news, or the government, and is generally untalented. He has wound up in the studio because one of his small insignificant doodles inspired his mother to designate him a future artist, thus also making a mockery of the pervasive biographical trope that the talents of celebrated artists are discovered in their youth.⁷⁷ Huart provides a grim forecast of the rapin’s success: he may transform into an artist but is more likely to become a shop sign painter and, barring that, could become an inexpensive model for artists. However, the rapin seems to consider himself with an assurance and nobility that contrasts with his station, and he enjoys peacocking. For instance, Huart suggests that the rapin particularly enjoys performing “the artist” at the Salon exhibition before adoring and appreciative audiences, and there behaves in a princely manner completely disproportionate to his station.⁷⁸

This vision of the rapin has its visual counterpart in Daumier’s 1836 lithograph Le Rapin, where a long-haired young man with a baguette protruding from his back pocket carries a sketch through the Louvre Museum (Figure 4.31). The caption describes the rapin as adopting “airs de genie” (airs of genius). He is otherwise a misanthrope and hates la foule (the masses). Following the fashion of other rapins, he hates Raphael and Antoine Watteau, and he even hates the wealth he will never attain. Again, Daumier forecasts the ignoble fate of the rapin, who will become a minor drawing instructor of a college in a small provincial town and “il y meurt inconnu” (he will die unknown).

Chaudes-Aigues’s picture is fairly similar, though for him the rapin is significantly younger—twelve to eighteen years old. He fleshes out some of the areas that Huart leaves vague. Huart’s rapin becomes an artist because his mother, presumably in ignorance, saw talent in his childhood doodles. Chaudes-Aigues specifies further that the rapin is lower-middle class and the son of a porter or an artisan. Huart’s eccentric and unkempt rapin has poor hygiene and dresses as painters did in the sixteenth century, wearing his hair long in hopes he will seem like a Renaissance master.⁷⁹ He is not only ignorant of politics, as Huart points out, but also of the liberal arts and literature in general.⁸⁰ The rapin devotes more energy to seeming inspired while drawing than to drawing something inspired, but nonetheless maintains a rigorous day of artistic education with his mornings spent in his master’s studio, his afternoons spent copying artwork at the Louvre Museum, and his late afternoons spent studying at the École des Beaux-Arts.⁸¹

The charlatan, sans souci, and rapin types all represent a type of artist whose claim to that title is entirely performative. For instance, Gavarni’s 1837 Disciples des Maîtres pictures two young artists who clutch drawings and mahlsticks under their arms (Figure 4.32). However, we are struck first and foremost by their odd hats, unique facial hair and coiffure, and strange dress. The artist on the left wears a cape and a double-breasted jacket with oversized buttons and, on the right, the pipe-smoking artist has a cropped jacket with broad lapels pulled back to reveal the overly trim tailoring of his waistcoat which results in an unseemly and prominent crinkling at the waist he hoped to emphasize. While these men have aped the behaviors, dress, gestures, and activities of artists, these images of them read more like absurd fashion plates, implying that their status as “artists” is superficial and performative. Artists like these, art-world satire argues, clog up the works, polluting the supply of artists with “artists” who do not merit this honorific title at all and rather do the title a disservice with their laziness, trickery, subversion, and libidinous behavior.

1848 as Social Experiment

In the opening scene of Crouton, chef d’école, ou le peintre véritablement artiste (1837), Crouton laments another unsuccessful attempt to have his work admitted by the Salon jury to the Louvre exhibition, admission to which, he was certain, would have finally signaled his exit “de mon illustre obscurité!” (from my illustrious obscurity!).⁸² In this phrase, Crouton captures the internal contradictions of a social type elaborated across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This type departed from representations of the exceptional and renowned painter, capturing instead the unknown, ordinary, and mediocre artist. Crouton the shop sign painter is obscure but, ironically, describes his obscurity as an illustrious trait; he is an artisan, but feels he should be recognized as an artist. Most importantly, he operates in complete ignorance of any essential difference between these categories. He, and the social types that grew up alongside him, straddle the categories of high and low, elite and popular, artistic and artisanal, and exceptional and ordinary. In so doing, they reveal the fundamental importance of processes of distinction and evaluation within the political economy of art that sought to separate the wheat from the chaff, the peintre (painting) from the peintre véritablement artiste (painter veritably [an] artist).

In the mid-eighteenth century, the artist’s aspirations to an elevated social status were ridiculed in satirical imagery. Following the introduction of the new juridical category of the artiste libre in 1776, the trope of the struggling artist overtook the image of the artist aspiring to emulate his social betters. Approaches to the representation of the struggling artist multiplied from the Revolution onward. In some cases, he nobly triumphed in his struggle, or was even blissfully unaware of it, so intent was he on pursuing the most elevated but least financially secure genre of painterly production. His noble triumph became increasingly delusional from the Empire onward, and the shop sign painter type emerged to better ridicule the discrepancy between the artist’s aspirations on the one hand, and his material conditions and lowly artistic production on the other. Increasingly, however, despair and disillusionment replaced delusion, as epitomized by Daumier’s 1843 shop sign painter (Figure 4.2). The portraitist who happily prostituted his artistic production to the emerging bourgeoisie remained a staple in the satirist’s arsenal, acting as a counterbalance to representations of the destitute artist’s growing sense of betrayal at the promised illustriousness of genius that contrasted sharply with the obscurity within which he toiled.

These social types criticized an art system by accusing it of fostering wildly unequal access to glory and renown, exposure and advancement, or even stable work and material well-being. To borrow the favored term of the authors of the radical Republican cultural periodical La Liberté, it was a system that promoted an aristocracy—a small and elite group of the favored, a distinct set of “winners.” Satirical imagery, through the inglorious artist, developed a social type that instead visualized the much more numerous “losers” who struggled to triumph within an art system that, from 1776 onward, allowed any and all supplicants to petition for entry. This fostered a very wide base of aspiring artists from which only a few were promoted to glory and renown.

In the July Monarchy, however, a return to the unanimously reviled ancien régime corporate system was unimaginable. Instead, Republican artists and illustrators highlighted the correspondences between the artist and the peuple, in this case most aptly translated as proletariat. This correspondence supported parallel initiatives to advocate for artists’ self-regulation and mutual support.⁸³ Nascent within this was a desire to improve the general material well-being of artists. For instance, by February 1848, when the July Monarchy was overturned in bloody revolution, Baron Taylor’s Association de secours mutuels des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, architectes, graveurs, et dessinateurs (Mutual Aid Society for artists, painters, sculptors, architects, en gravers, and draughtsmen) had a membership of over three thousand.⁸⁴

Indeed, the Second Republic served as a brief trial of what alternative art systems could look like and what their goals should be.⁸⁵ Should all aspiring artists be able to earn enough to secure a minimum standard of living? Should access to opportunities for renown and glory, still concentrated in the annual Salon exhibition, be rendered more accessible to a larger number of supplicants? Should the gatekeeping stages of the cursus honorum be given over to the peuple-artiste, and taken from the hands of the connoisseurs, the “artistic aristocracy” of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and administrators?

During the Spring of 1848, the toil and struggle of these pervasive criticisms culminated in an opportunity to effect real social change within the profession of art-making in Paris. Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, Minister of the Interior for the provisional government initiated three endeavors that trialed a new art system. Firstly, after recommending the selection of a democratically elected jury, he instead asked artists to assign a hanging com mittee for the first Salon libre since 1793, to open on March 15, 1848, where every artist’s submission was guaranteed exhibition.⁸⁶ On March 14, he asked artists to devise an allegorical representation of the French Republic to be selected democratically in emulation of the Revolutionary concours.⁸⁷ And on April 18, he gave leave to a then little-known painter, Paul Chenavard, to employ a workshop of artists who, with guaranteed employment for a period of eight years, would collectively produce a fresco of the history of civilization for the Pantheon.⁸⁸

Ledru-Rollin’s hanging committee for the 1848 Salon would, for the first time, be comprised entirely of visual artists. His proposed commission of forty artists included fifteen painters, eleven sculptors, five engravers, five architects, and four lithographers, the latter of whom had been systematically excluded from the Académie des Beaux-Arts.⁸⁹ Just days after Ledru-Rollin’s February 29 arrêté (decree) announcing the Salon libre and commission of forty artists, a delegation of artists and a separate petition signed by Eugène Delacroix, Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and others protested that no one individual should appoint this commission.⁹⁰ Instead, a large and anarchic group of artists met to collectively and democratically elect representatives to the commission to hang the Salon libre, which later became a Permanent Commission for Fine Arts.⁹¹ The resulting exhibit of over five thousand artworks crammed into the Louvre miraculously opened on time. But it was universally panned, derided mercilessly for the poor quality of the works exhibited and the preference among exhibitors for genre and animal painting. Damage control was urgently enlisted through the naming of a Directeur des Beaux-Arts, Charles Blanc, who, upon his April 1 appointment, closed the Salon to rehang its contents, reopening the exhibition on April 26.⁹²

Cham (Amédée de Noé, 1818–1879), illustrating for the centrist weekly L’Illustration, ridiculed the principles of universal suffrage and equitable access to exposure championed by the corps entier des Artistes (entire community of Artists), which appointed the commission of forty to hang the Salon exhibition.⁹³ In the March 11, 1848 issue, he mocked those artists who believed that their status as practitioners were sufficient credentials to take charge of arts administration (Figure 4.33). Upon the Salon’s rehang, Cham’s April 29 Salon caricatural pictured the Salon audience, who, for the first time in art-world satire, collapse in laughter at the works on display instead of gawking in awe (Figure 4.34). On the facing page, a peddler of the monumental Salon livret struggles to lift the ridiculously large list of artists and artworks on display at the Louvre exhibition (Figure 4.35).⁹⁴

Cham, L’Illustration, and Salon audiences voiced their unwillingness to abandon an economy of symbolic goods, in which excellence and exceptionality were privileged above equitable access to opportunity. Instead, illustrators such as Cham proposed that the boundaries of the category of “artist” be more stringently policed, as implied by another April 29 image, L’avenir des artistes (Artists’ prospects, Figure 4.36), in which he imagines a future where, rather than be admitted to the Salon libre, these pretend artists are enlisted in the National Guard.

Chenavard and Ledru-Rollin’s attempts to transform the former’s Pantheon commission into a make-work opportunity for artists experienced a similar, though less public, failure. Though he received generous sums with which to employ others to produce designs for the fresco, artist after artist withdrew from the project, protesting that they were underpaid and that primary authorship would be given to Chenavard alone, bristling at the violation of their independent creative authority. In 1851, after Napoléon III’s coup d’état, the Pantheon was briefly de-secularized and reconsecrated the église St-Geneviève. Chenavard’s compositions had not been finalized much less applied to the building’s interior walls.⁹⁵

Art publics and practitioners alike demonstrated a collective resistance to attempts to democratize the art world, increase its inclusivity, and redistribute opportunities to more artists, evidencing a tenacious ideological investment in those very notions that art-world satire had worked to undermine: the inalienable association between liberty and competitive individualism, and the genius of the artist as an innate semi-divine power of revelation.⁹⁶ Paris’s art world was not yet ready, even in the socialist euphoria of 1848, to collectively abandon its newfound conviction that to be a genius was innate and that to pursue genius one must do so alone. Parisian proto-socialist desires to develop inclusive artistic community oriented toward ensuring collective material well-being were undermined by an ideological investment in the notion of Romantic genius—a notion that had blossomed alongside the development of early industrial and speculative capitalism at the end of the eighteenth century. The art world was, however, infused with more democratic processes. For instance, a jury was elected for the following Salon, which was held in the Tuileries Palace before being moved to the Palais-National (Palais-Royal), though the number of works exhibited returned to late July Monarchy levels.⁹⁷

Indeed, we can also find the traces of tenacious ideological investment in earlier art-world graphic satire via the popular social type of the charlatan artist, of which Crouton is an example. In many ways, Crouton and the charlatan artist epitomized anxieties around the dangers inherent in fostering a more equitable art world. Could the democratization and increasing accessibility of artistic formation and exhibition pave the way for mediocrity, even delinquency, among artists, thus diluting artistic excellence and fostering complacency? Or, recalling the image of the prostituting portraitist and the bourgeois as antagonist, had the art world left itself vulnerable to a new class of commercially savvy and profit-driven opportunistic artists who would infiltrate their ranks, pandering to the highest bidder at the expense of the progress of the arts?

In essence, the corps entier des Artistes attempted to disrupt the structure of the art world’s administration by rendering it inclusive—unlike the Institut de France and the Académie royale before it—and artist-led, unlike arts administration from the Revolutionary period onward. It attempted to reimagine the nature of public commissions by turning them into collaborative make-work opportunities for larger numbers of artists who would share credit in an attempt to dismantle the conditions that generated an artistic aristocracy. These initiatives failed not because they were horrendous responses to the problems that artists had bemoaned for a century across hundreds of satirical images, in the periodical press, and to one another in ways that the historical record is incapable of capturing. These initiatives failed because the art world was incapable of abandoning its ideological investment in competitive individualism as the only pathway to excellence. To acknowledge the artist as peuple is also to accept that even those artists whom a panel of experts might deem mediocre are nonetheless still a part of the art world. And to acknowledge the artist’s material needs is to contradict the logics of an economy of symbolic goods in which economic, material, or commercial thinking are exiled.

Louis Reybaud, political economist on the center-left, crystallized these concerns in his popular character of 1846, Jérome Paturot, who resurfaced in 1848 to give voice to Reybaud’s comments on the Second Republic.⁹⁸ The fictional Paturot’s friend, the painter Oscar, leaps at the opportunity to display his art at the Louvre. Paturot explains the dynamics of a democratized art world with crystal clarity: “L’aristocratie du pinceau avait fait son temps; c’était au tour du tiers-état de la roture. Oscar appartenait à cette dernière expression de l’art; il était l’un des héros obscurs de la peinture plébéienne” (The aristocracy of the brush has had its time; it is the turn of the Third Estate of common birth. Oscar belonged to this last expression of art; he was one of those oscure heros of plebeian painting).⁹⁹ However, upon suffering the Parisian public’s laughter and derision at his Salon submission, Oscar is enraged and vows to abandon the paintbrush. Paturot unsympathetically remarks to himself in response: “je n’en persistais pas moins à voir dans cet étalage de médiocrités un symptôme irrécusable de décadence. Les arts on besoin surtout d’une règle respectée [ . . . ] Où est la limite assignée au caprice?” (I could not help but see in this display of mediocrities an indisputable symptom of decadence. The arts are above all in need of a respected law [ . . . ] Where [do we] draw the limits of caprice?).¹⁰⁰ Oscar, however, drags Paturot to a second exhibition to which he has submitted his work: the competition for the allegorical representation of the French Republic.¹⁰¹ His submission is just as mediocre but he wrests a positive evaluation from Paturot.¹⁰² Reybaud, through Oscar, defends the tenacity of a cultural sphere that relies on championing a select few from among a sea of mediocrity.

July Monarchy art-world satire underwent significant shifts in comparison to its antecedents. Short fiction outpaced theater as a vehicle for satire, while the emergence of the periodical press, and specifically, satirical periodicals, swelled the numbers of art-world graphic satire. Despite this growth in numbers, however, art-world satirical “types” consolidated and merged. The prostituting portraitist and the shop sign painter were eclipsed by the trope of the bohemian painter—a type that, in fact, incorporates salient elements of popular ancien régime, Revolutionary, Empire, and Restoration types.

Most notably, July Monarchy imagery consolidated not only its satirical types, but also its messaging. The bohemian artist’s poverty and desperation became axiomatic, as did his resigned acceptance of his situation. His bourgeois antagonist evolved into an ever-present and inescapable evil. What July Monarchy art-world satire adds to this discussion is a significant source of fear: the vulgarization of the art world. This vulgarization threatened the excellence of artistic production and the progress of the arts in two ways: bad artists infiltrated the art world and diluted the progress of French art with their mediocre productions; and nouveau riche tasteless bourgeois buyers incapable of thinking beyond their self-centered commercial preoccupations compromised the progress of the arts through their unimaginative, vain, and exceedingly mundane patronage.

Yet, when presented another opportunity to effect radical revolutionary change in the art world in 1848—a spiritual, but very short-lived successor to 1789—French artists found themselves incapable of arriving at a sustainable solution. To democratize artistic administration and reimagine the image of the artist as an underpaid cultural worker was in direct confrontation with the image of the artist as a solitary genius who struggles in infamy and is recognized later in life or perhaps only posthumously.