"Clown" from The Complete Works of Béranger 1836

J.J. Grandville made this print, "Clown" or "Paillasse," for an edition of the collected works of the popular French songwriter Béranger. The artist was a famous caricaturist in France in the 1830s and 40s. At the time, French printmakers were experimenting with ways to use images to challenge social norms, often turning to satire. This etching is particularly interesting for the way it plays with ideas about class and hierarchy. Here, we see a clown entertaining an aristocrat. Grandville is playing on a tradition of clowning and street performance that was well established in French culture, and he is also engaging in commentary about the French class structure. To understand this print fully, we might look at theater and performance history, or even study other examples of visual satire from this period. Art, after all, doesn’t exist in a vacuum: it’s part of a broad historical conversation.