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

Inglorious Artists: Art-World Satire and the Emergence of a Capitalist Art Market in Paris, 1750-1850 is a book length data-driven study by Kathryn Desplanque published by University of Delaware press. The book 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. Inglorious Artists 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. 

This website showcases the corpus and metadata assembled to write Inglorious Artists, making these 532 previously unstudied and unpublished satirical images accessible. This website replicates much of the functionality of Prof. Desplanque’s original database, constructed using NVivo. Further information on Prof. Desplanque’s methodologies can be found in her book’s introduction.

You are invited to:

• Scroll through the entire corpus using Browse
• View the corpus by the French political regime in which images were published using Explore
• Click through the iconographic tags associated to each image to view other images associated to the same iconographic tags
• Query the database for more specific data-driven searches using the website’s interactive data visualization and its filters using Data Visualization