Musical life in nineteenth-century France as seen through iconography

During the 1840s, technical advances made it possible for European periodicals to publish images regularly and on a massive scale. L’Illustration was a pioneering magazine in this domain, soon to be joined by other titles whose pages feature a variety of depictions of the musical life of the time: concert or operatic performances, portraits, instrument makers’ workshops, soirées in a salon, etc. What can we learn from these pictures commissioned to illustrate articles?