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

by Kathryn Desplanque
Open Access
Cover: Inglorious Artists: Art World Satire and the Emergence of a Capitalist Art Market in Paris, 1750-1850
Author
Kathryn Desplanque

Hardback
July 2025 • ISBN 9781644533642 • $150.00

Paperback
July 2025 • ISBN 9781644533635 • $74.95

* E-Book Available
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Series
Studies in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture

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 Paris’ art world — 532 images that have never been studied or published. While it has become commonplace for art historians to characterize this period of turbulent political history as one of liberalization and a triumph for the artist and their freedom, we have neglected the multifaceted complaints of visual artists contemporary to these changes who expressed themselves in the medium most accessible to them: the graphic image. Through a digital humanities driven examination of the evolution of the trope of the starving artist, this book provides a new social history of the status of the artist, revealing the ways in which the trope of the starving artist was used to both protest the emergence of an early capitalist art market and to re-frame the artist and artwork’s distinction from an increasingly commercial world. By examining this unstudied and unknown imagery for the first time, Inglorious Artists reveals that the emergence of our modern conception of the artist is far more conflicted than we initially considered.

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

About the Author

Kathryn Desplanque is assistant professor of 18th- and 19th-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. Inglorious Artists is her first book project. Her second 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 to consider the conceptual overlap between today’s image-sharing smartphone applications and scrap sheets and scrapbooking through the lens of mass customization and curatorial consumption.

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

“
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, CUNY Graduate Center