The Private Room (fourth plate) 

Jean-Louis Forain made this lithograph, The Private Room, using a greasy crayon on a smooth slab of Bavarian limestone. It's a quintessentially industrial medium, perfectly suited to the mass production of images. Yet, despite the mechanical nature of the process, there is nothing slick or seamless about the image. You can really see the artist at work, bearing down on the stone, creating a smudgy, grainy texture. It’s almost as if Forain wanted to emphasize the drawing, the hand-made aspect of the print, even as he took advantage of its reproductive capacity. This tension between the unique and the multiple is essential to understanding the print’s social context. Forain was a master of depicting the demimonde of Paris, the shadowy world of sex workers and their clients. Lithography allowed him to circulate these images widely, making them available to a broad audience. This speaks to the democratizing potential of printmaking, but also raises questions about exploitation and the commodification of both art and life.