Octave Tassaert

His genre pieces evoked the miserable life of the downtrodden in Paris and included a number of scenes of suicide.

This shook his self-confidence so badly that for the next twenty years he returned to wood engraving and lithography as a commercial artist.

His first success was the purchase of his painting The Death of Correggio by the Duke of Orleans, the French king's son (Salon 1834, now in the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg).

Tassaert's historical, religious, allegorical, and especially genre scenes, often melodramatic in character, earned him nicknames such as the "Prud'hon of the Poor Man" or the "Correggio of the Attic.

"[2] In the 1850s he had some success with paintings depicting the lives of the disadvantaged: unhappy families, dying mothers, sick or abandoned children and wives, and the like.

[5] Although his contribution to the 1855 exposition universelle was well received by critics, Tassaert increasingly withdrew from the art world which he despised and did not exhibit again after the Salon of 1857.

[1] Among Tassaert's contemporary admirers were Eugène Delacroix and the Barbizon artists Charles Jacque, Narcisso Virgilio Díaz de la Peña, Constant Troyon, and Léon Bonnat.