Paul Delaroche: Painting and Popular Spectacle explores the connections between painting and an emergent popular visual culture in the early nineteenth century, which included new forms of optical entertainment such as Panoramas and Dioramas and innovation in fields such as illustration, art reproduction, and stage decor. Delaroche's paintings caused a sensation at the Paris Salon, with critics comparing the emotional response they elicited to that of popular melodrama. Yet his appeal to a certain type of spectator lay behind the increasingly hostile criticism to which his works were...