Inglorious Artists: Art World Satire and the Emergence of a Capitalist Art Market in Paris, 1750-1850

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Inglorious Artists: Art World Satire and the Emergence of a Capitalist Art Market in Paris, 1750-1850

by Kathryn Desplanque

University of Delaware Press, 2025

ISBNs

Cloth: 978-1-64453-364-2

Paper: 978-1-64453-363-5

eISBN: 978-1-64453-365-9 (ePub)

eISBN: 978-1-64453-366-6 (PDF)

About the Book

Inglorious Artists traces the origins of the image of the starving artist to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France, where practicing and aspiring visual artists mobilized the emerging genre of graphic satire to publish hundreds of satirical images that satirized the Paris art world. By examining many of these images, which have never before been studied or published, this book provides a new social history of the status of the artist, revealing the ways in which the starving artist trope was used to protest the emergence of an early capitalist art market and to distinguish artists and their work from an increasingly commercial world. During this period, a series of political revolutions brought the possibility of radical change in the French art world. Parisian artists struggled to keep pace with the emergence of modern financial speculative capitalism, transitioning away from an art system dominated by guild and corporate interest. We have neglected the complaints visual artists made about these changes, expressed in the medium most accessible to them: the graphic image. In examining this imagery for the first time, Inglorious Artists reveals that the emergence of our modern conception of the artist is far more conflicted than has been considered.

This book is also freely available online as an open access digital edition.

About the Author

Kathryn Desplanque is an assistant professor of eighteenth- and nineteenth-Century European art in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her work specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European visual culture, particularly French and English imagery. She has authored numerous book chapters and has published articles in such journals as Eighteenth-Century Studies, Biblio 17: Voyages, rencontres, échanges au XVIIe siècle, and The Art Bulletin. Her current book project, Papermania, charts the growing popularity of scrap sheets and scrapbooking across France, England, and North America during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Reviews

Kathryn Desplanque’s Inglorious Artists: Art-World Satire and the Emergence of a Capitalist Art Market in Paris, 1750-1850 marks a new stage in our understanding not just of caricature, but also of art market studies and even of modern art. Immensely readable and profusely illustrated, her study takes a broad view of the economic and political changes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that affected the very definition of an artist. Through her insight into their work, we understand how the artists themselves attempted to navigate the new social and economic currents that precipitated modern definitions of the artist as an outcast from society, starving and impoverished, but nonetheless an independent and prophetic genius.— Patricia Mainardi, author of Another World: Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Print Culture (2017)