After visiting the Louvre in the 1870s, an American traveler noted that "along the galleries are numerous temporary stands, easels, etc., at which artists are constantly at work copying such paintings as they may have orders for, or hope to find purchasers for" (as quoted in Barbara Stern Shapiro, Pleasures of Paris: Daumier to Picasso, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1991, p. 108).

Stumbling across a working artist and his accoutrements was not a rare occurrence for the museumgoer in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Viewing and copying the museum's masterpieces was a traditional part of an artist's education, and a practice Béroud both enjoyed and used as the subject of at least twenty...