The Significance of Marie Duval’s Drawing Style

Abstract

Duval’s drawings were made to provoke laughter, by articulating and rearticulating social stereotypes and contradictions. Duval achieved this in her choice of topics and, more unusually, in her use of ideas of her own position as a humorous visual journalist: her visible lack of training, stage career, gender and social class, relative to the experiences of readers. This chapter will examine this articulation, considering late nineteenth-century gender and class relationships between humour, displays of technical skill and concepts of vulgar behaviour. The chapter will finally exemplify these relationships in two Duval drawings on the topic of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions of 1880 and 1876.