that Carpentier was interested in Renoir's art (as far as is known, alone of the Impressionists-to-be) provides another perspective on the painter's work at this period, for many of his compositions of the late i86os and early iSyos, among them La Promenade, show a lightness and delicacy of touch comparable to the 21 art of Rococo painters such as Fragonard. Renoir had been a great enthusiast of French eighteenth-century painting since his early days as a decorator of porce- lain. La Promenade would presumably have been the type of painting that he would have sought to sell to a dealer such as Carpentier. The production and marketing of paintings like La Promenade belongs to a larger history, that of the emergence of the commercial art dealer as the primary outlet for smaller, domestic-scaled paintings. Although the Salon continued to be by far the most important means of attracting the attention of buyers, by the 18505 there were many dealers in Paris operating out of small shops and displaying an ever-changing selection of their stock in their shop windows. It was the window displays that led Theophile Gautier in 1858 to describe rue Laffitte, the principal art dealers' street, as "a sort of perma- 22 nent Salon." The Deforge/Carpentier shop was nearby on the boulevard Montmartre. The advantages of showing smaller pictures in smaller spaces were described in 1861 by the genre painter Frangois Bonvin, writing to Louis Martinet, the director of a gallery space that mounted exhibitions of contempo- rary art in the early i86os: Yet another good mark for your idea of holding a permanent exhibition! That picture I brought you a week ago has just attracted the notice of the ministry to me. Placed in the big exhi- bition, where there are often many similar pictures, this canvas would not, perhaps, have been noticed. Intimate painting [la peinture intime], large or small, needs a setting like yours: larger 23 is too large. It was difficult for an artist to sell his work to dealers, however, if he had not made a name at the Salon. Eugene Boudin's attempts to market his works during the i86os provide insight into this problem. With luck, he might 20