Paysagistes au Travail! (Landscape artists at work!),

1862

Relaxation of French press-censorship laws in 1830 gave rise to a number of populist newspapers critical of the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe and the bourgeois values he supported. Most notable were those that combined journalism with the art of caricature. For nearly thirty years, Daumier regularly supplied lithographs to these publications, until 1860, when he left Le Charivari to devote himself to painting, while occasionally contributing lithographs and wood engravings to more recently established journals. Le Boulevard was one such publication, issued by Etienne Carjat in 1862–63. Daumier provided eleven lithographs to Le Boulevard, including these humorous observations of the fashionable, but rapidly changing, Parisian art world.