1771

Prostitutes Being Led Off to La Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris

French, 1734 - 1816

By the 1750s, Étienne Jeaurat, a successful painter of mythological subjects at the Royal Academy, had come to specialize in scenes of everyday life in Paris. In this engraving after a painting exhibited by Jeaurat in the 1757 Salon, a wagon of prostitutes accompanied by soldiers is led to La Salpêtrière hospital on the outskirts of Paris, where they are to be incarcerated in the facility's prison quarters. The covered wagon passing under the arch at left was used to transport women who paid to have their identities protected.