Taken from the Daumier Registry: http://www.daumier-register.org/werkview.php?key=3316
LE PUBLIC À L'EXPOSITION, Croquis par Daumier (The public at the exhibition) is a small series of three prints (gillotages), which appeared in the Journal Amusant in June 1864 (and in 1876 in the Petit Journal pour Rire). ABOUT THIS PRINT. Only the very rare first state of the three prints of this series can be considered an original lithograph. The following ones published in the JOURNAL AMUSANT (second state) and LE PETIT JOURNAL POUR RIRE (third state) have all been produced under the process GILLOT GILLOTAGE and unfortunately do not show the same quality of print as the first lithographic ones. DR numbers 3315, 3316, 3317 can be found at the Bibliothèque de l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, carrying handwritten titles and captions by Daumier himself.The SALON, the yearly art exhibitions in Paris, were actually art fairs which attracted approximately 1 million visitors from Paris and the provinces. Hundreds of painters and sculptors exhibited.
Monsieur Joseph PRUDHOMME is an artificial figure created by Henri Bonaventure Monnier. The figure appeared already before the existence of the Charivari in publications like “Magasin des Visages” and “La Galerie des Grotesques”. Prudhomme impersonated the complacent, corpulent bourgeois of that period. Monnier described him to the point when he called him “nullité magistrale” (pompous nothingness), entirely self-satisfied with himself and his insignificance.
Henri Bonaventure (1799 – 1877) author, draughtsman and lithographer. From 1830 on he worked for “La Caricature”. He also was an actor. One of his roles was Brazier in “La Famille Improvisée” (1831). He created the book “Scènes Populaires Dessinées à la Plume” (1830). In 1830, he wrote together with Vaez the drama "Grandeur et Décadence de Monsieur Prudhomme". Daumier drew a portrait of Monnier in DR 2347.
Gillotage was invented by the Frenchman Firmin Gillot (1820-72) in 1850 and subsequently perfected by his son Charles to include photographic transfer of the image to the metal plate. In the nineteenth century, gillotage was one of the many techniques for making relief metal plates for letterpress printing.
Mainly used for printing illustrations in books and periodicals, gillotage competed with wood engraving and other emerging industrial printing methods. Firmin Gillot named his invention “paneiconographie,” but very quickly the term gillotage, derived from the inventor’s name, became more popular. The technique evolved rapidly to meet the needs of its consumers, featuring new inventions and improvements such as specialized scratchboard papers and possibilities for color printing. At the end of the nineteenth century the term gillotage came to signify all photomechanical relief processes in France, testifying to the method’s popularity.
In the twentieth century, the term photoengraving or line block became a more popular name for this process, and Gillot’s establishment successfully competed with similar firms around the world.