ABSTRACT

This chapter presents a letter to Gautier from the Swiss-born French sculptor James Pradier, from which the title of this study is taken, was one of a number he wrote during the first summer of the Second Republic to draw attention to his financial plight and that of artists in general. The annual Salon had closed its doors at the beginning of July and Pradier was trying to secure the sale to the State, for the museum in Montpellier, of one of the works he had shown there, his marble statue Nyssia. The change of regime triggered by the revolution of 1848 created challenges and opportunities for the skills he had acquired and for the relationships he had nurtured since beginning to write art criticism in the early 1830s.6 These skills and relationships, the part they played and the purposes to which they were put during the Second Republic.