Palace of Industry

This engraving by Auguste Trichon, titled “Palace of Industry,” depicts the Palais de l’Industrie in Paris in a nineteenth-century architectural view. The composition highlights the building’s great central arch, its long ordered façades, and the urban activity around it, with walkers, riders, and carriages. Rather than showing a specific event, the image offers a documentary and monumental representation of an emblematic building of imperial Paris, constructed to host major artistic and industrial exhibitions. Published in 1866 in volume 2 of the Dictionnaire populaire illustré d'histoire, de géographie, de biographie, de technologie, de mythologie, d'antiquités, des beaux-arts et de littérature, this illustration belongs to the nineteenth-century scholarly tradition that sought to circulate visual images of notable monuments.