The Exhausted Ragpicker

In this print, Raffaëlli depicts a well-known nineteenth-century Parisian type known as the ragpicker. Often marginalized by contemporary society, the ragpicker traditionally wandered the city collecting refuse and old rags that were eventually made into paper. Displaced to the outskirts of the city by the reorganization of Paris under Baron Haussmann, the ragpicker was also a popular modern subject and stand-in for avant-garde artists whose innovative techniques and subjects often left them on the margins of artistic society. Raffaelli intended to contribute this print to an experimental and unrealized publication titled Le Jour et La Nuit (Night and Day). Though it was never published, Raffaelli exhibited successive states of this print at the fifth Impressionist exhibition in 1880, the first time he exhibited with the group.