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The picture shows the artist's as a crowded and social space, where work was more likely to be interrupted by loungers and visitors, fencing matches and dog fights, than by melancholy soul-searching. Yet in fact this is an image of frustration. The fall of Napoleon had left the once-fashionable Vernet bereft of subjects and patrons, and his political views had excluded him from the Paris Salon of 1821. He had been obliged to show in this very studio, including his picture of it as an ironic symbol of the impasse to which he had been brought.
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