Inconvenient d'envoyer un mauvais tableau à l'exposition.... (The Disadvantage of Sending a Bad Painting to the Exhibition...), from the series Les Artistes

Daumier frequently depicted with good-humored irony the trials and tribulations of the artist struggling for recognition. New talent was often frustrated by the old-fashioned and stifling aes-thetic values of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, whose annual exhibition or salon was an artist’s primary means of being discovered. Even if a work passed muster with the sa-lon’s jury, it could still face the tactless incomprehension of a bourgeois viewing public. Here an artist complains that his landscape painting—a genre considered inferior by the Royal Acade-my—has received a poor reception.