Although his contribution to the 1855 exposition universelle was well received by critics, Tassaert increasingly withdrew from the art world which he despised and did not exhibit again after the Salon of 1857. Some of his contemporaries found this work rather sentimental. With his depictions of social injustice, he sought to strike an emotional chord with the viewer. He subsequently produced other works depicting the bleak lives of working women in Paris. It shows a sensitive depiction of the double suicide of a mother and daughter by burning charcoal in their attic.

An example of this is his work An Unfortunate Family or Suicide, shown at the Salon of 1850/51. Tassaert's historical, religious, allegorical, and especially genre scenes, often melodramatic in character, earned him nicknames such as the 'Prud'hon of the Poor Man' or the 'Correggio of the Attic.' In the 1850s he had some success with paintings depicting the lives of the disadvantaged: unhappy families, dying mothers, sick or abandoned children and wives, and the like. His first success was the purchase of his painting The Death of Correggio by the Duke of Orleans, the French king's son (Salon 1834, now in the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg). He began painting again and exhibited at the Paris salons. He also illustrated books for Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas the Elder, François-René de Chateaubriand and others. It was mainly during this period that he produced his numerous erotic lithographs for collectors. This shook his self-confidence so badly that for the next twenty years he returned to wood engraving and lithography as a commercial artist. From 1823 to 1824 he worked purposefully toward the Prix de Rome, but was unable to win it. Guillaume Guillon Lethière was one of his professors. On 1 February 1817, he was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In the meantime he tried his hand at painting. In 1816 he worked for some time with the engraver Alexis-François Girard (1787–1870). Together with his brother Paul, he first produced wood engravings. Octave's first artistic training came from his father and then his older brother Paul (?-1855), both of whom were print artists and art dealers. 1835) and grandson of the Flemish sculptor Jean-Pierre-Antoine Tassaert, who had worked mainly in Paris and Berlin. He was the son of the engraver Jean-Joseph-François Tassaert (1765-c. Octave Tassaert came from an originally Flemish family of artists who worked mainly in Antwerp, Paris and Prussia. He was the grandson of the Flemish sculptor Jean-Pierre-Antoine Tassaert. He was later in life active as a writer and poet. He further created sensuous images of women and erotic scenes. His genre pieces evoked the miserable life of the downtrodden in Paris and included a number of scenes of suicide. Nicolas François Octave Tassaert (Paris, 26 July 1800 – Paris, 24 April 1874) was a French painter of portraits and genre, religious, historical and allegorical paintings, as well as a lithographer and engraver. Self-portrait holding a brush and palette

Octave tassaert