ABSTRACT
By his death nearly 40 years later, Paul Gavarni had produced and published something in the order of 10,000 pictures, almost all of them being pictures of social types from every Parisian milieu. Lithography was a new process invented in Germany in 1798 and patented in England shortly after. In this process the artist draws freehand with a greasy crayon or ink directly onto a specially prepared stone surface. This stone can then be used to pull large numbers of copies without any signs of wear, so that several thousand good copies can be produced. The great disadvantage of lithography was that it could not be combined with letter-press printing on the new Stanhope printing presses. Printers, publishers and booksellers had an old but fecund commodity on their hands which could be resold to a new generation of purchasers.
