"Salon Caricature in Second Empire Paris" examines a genre of caricature widely published in the Parisian popular press in the second half of the Nineteenth Century in which caricaturists comically reproduced the paintings on display at the Salon, the state-sponsored public exhibition of art in Paris. Salon caricature has, in art historical texts, traditionally played the role of the graphic incarnation of public laughter at an emerging avant garde, in part because a skewed sample of caricatures, exclusively after Manet and Courbet, have been reproduced widely. Correcting for this skewed sample, I show that Salon caricature relished equally academic and official painters and those later canonized as "modernist." This dissertation provides new ways of thinking about this genre, particularly considering the nature of its representation of subjective vision, its operations as pictorial criticism, its relation to the techniques of the press and to reproductive technology, and its ability to mediate not only single paintings but the increasingly chaotic spectacle of the Second Empire public art exhibition.