A Day When You Do Not Pay–Twenty-Five-Degree Heat (Un jour ou l'on ne paye pas. Vingt-cinq degres de chaleur ), from Le Public du Salon, published in Le Charivari, May 17, 1852
Honoré Daumier French
Printer Charles Trinocq French
Publisher Maison Martinet-Hautecoeur, Frères French
Not on view
As with popular museum exhibitions today, the yearly Parisian Salons in the mid-nineteenth century attracted people in large numbers. Daumier devoted an entire series of eleven lithographs, published in Le Charivari over the course of a month, to poking fun at the public visiting the Salon. One of these depicts a family taken aback by the entry fee of five francs; here, in contrast, an enormous crowd has turned up for the free admission day. Daumier particularly relished depicting situations in which diverse types of people confronted each other in a small space. Two young children weave their way through the crowd, which is composed mostly of men in top hats. A woman in a voluminous dress and bonnet is fanning herself with a handkerchief to counter the heat produced by the crush of bodies. The visitors hardly appear to take note of the artwork, equally tightly sqeezed onto the wall. In the Salon of that year, 1,757 paintings were exhibited at the Palais Royal.
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