This is the first book length study of Salon caricature, a widespread genre of press illustration that flourished in Paris in the second half of the 19th century. Salon caricature began with a few tentative lithographs in the 1840s and, within a few decades, no Parisian exhibition could open without appearing in warped, incisive, and hilarious miniature in the pages of the illustrated press.

Supported by ample primary sources, from Baudelaire and Champfleury, to Grand-Carteret and Duret, as well as archival material made available here for the first time, Laugh Lines explores not only 19th-century caricature but a larger history of reproductive image technologies, including photography, and their relation to painting during the period of modernist emergence.

In bringing to light this rich register of art criticism-in-pictures, Laugh Lines offers new material and methods for the study of 19th-century painting, modernism, and art historiography, notably repositioning