middle of the courtyard; the smaller pictures were placed on benches along the walls, all in the open air, and above them the immense compositions of Le Brun that now adorn the vestibule of the throne-room in the Louvre: The Defeat of Porus,' 'The Passage of the Granicus,' The Battle of Arbellæ,' and 'The Triumph of Alexander '-and the historical pictures of Van der Meulen that now figure in the Louvre or in the galleries of Versailles. 6 Having seen how the Salon was founded, we shall not need to dwell at much length on the early exhibitions of 1675 and 1683. The Academy went on prospering, and in 1699 we find it installed in the Palace of the Louvre, then occupied by miscellaneous tenants of all kinds, for since the troubles of the Fronde the kings had not inhabited Paris, and the Louvre, still unfinished, was a curious mixture of splendour and of ruin. In 1699 the exhibition was held with great parade in the gallery of Apollo, and inaugurated the long series of the Salons du Louvre. The Salon, however, had not yet become fashionable, and although this exhibition of 1669 was a success, as is proved by an article in the pompous 'Mercure de France,' the exhibition was not repeated again until 1704; and, until 1740, the few exhibitions that took place had but little importance and have left no traces. But towards 1740, Oudry, Carle Vanloo, Boucher, Natoire, De la Cour, Bonchardon, Vernet, &c., were working for the luxurious millionaires of the Regency, and suddenly the Salon became so fashionable that in 1747 the members of the Academy demanded the authorisation to exhibit every year. From the multitude of documents that the people of the eighteenth century have left relative to their private life, we might easily reconstitute the physiognomy of the Salon as it was hundred years ago. We should find the Place du Louvre encumbered with the low and lumbering carriages of the epoch, and towards noon the doors of the Salon are besieged by a crowd of gentlemen in powdered wigs, ladies with trains, valets in livery. In the vestibule the bookseller Le Comte has a stand where he sells all the catalogues, pamphlets, and vaudevilles that have appeared on the occasion of the Salon: a perfect deluge, says Sebastien Mercier. In the vestibule, too, are loafers who for twenty sous offer to show the visitors the best pictures, and to sing the couplets that have been composed on the most remarkable. The crowd mounts the staircase under the imposing superintendence of a Suisse, and finally enters the Salon du Louvre, the present Salon carré, 'the largest and most perfectly proportioned which exists in any palace in Europe,' says Mercier. 'People go there in crowds. Poetry and music do not obtain so great a number of amateurs. The floods of people do not fail from morning until night for six whole weeks. There are moments when the heat is suffocating. You see there pictures eighteen feet long, and miniatures no larger than your thumb. . . . In the engravings of the Salons of the time we see the ladies with their immense paniers and pyramidal head-dresses; the men with their swords at their side, their hats under their arms, their hair in bag-wigs and powder, their two watch-chains hanging out of their fobs, their thin shoes with big buckles, and in their hands a magnifying glass. All Paris is there saluting, ogling, gossiping. From time to time the crowd becomes silent; the Suisse strikes the floor with his halberd, and some grand seigneur or important personage enters; for, following the example set by Colbert in the previous century, the Ministers each year honour the Salon with their presence. During the reign of Louis XVI., eight exhibitions took place at the Louvre, and at these exhibitions the two painters who attracted most attention were David and Mme. Lebrun. Curiously enough, just on the eve of the Revolution, the Salons were more gay and animated than ever, and every picture almost had the honour of contemporary song and verse. Paris had not yet discovered that it was living under a régime of frightful tyranny, and in this happy epoch everything found its way into rhyme. In 1789 the powdered marquises, and the fair dames with paniers and bergère hats, visited the Salon for the last time. At the end. of the year were exile, war, emigration, the scaffold, the end of the old régime. When the Salon re-opened two years later, a whole world had fallen into ruin, and a new world had risen in its place. 6 The all-powerful National Assembly having, by a decree of August 21, decided that all the painters of France were equal in talent and in rights, the Salon of 1791 was a mere bazaar of pictures, which overflowed from the Salon carré into the gallery of Apollo, and even down the staircase into the courtyard. The crowd this year gathered before David's sketch of Le Serment du Jeu de Paume.' In 1793 the Salon opened on August 10, and in the 'Description du Salon de 1793' we read: 'It will seem perhaps strange to austere republicans that we concern ourselves with art at a moment when allied Europe is besieging the territory of liberty. The artists do not fear the reproach of carelessness of the interests of their fatherland. They are essentially free. . . We would remind people of Protogenes tracing a masterpiece in the midst of besieged Rhodes, or of Archimedes meditating on a problem during the sacking of Syracuse.' But during this charm ing epoch, as we read in 'Nouveau Paris,' the theatres, the restaurants were full of tranquil gossips and newsmongers. The people watched calmly the erection of a revolutionary tribunal, and continued to go peacefully to the opera. The curtain rose exactly at the same hour, whether sixty heads were cut off or only thirty.' Nevertheless, during the Reign of Terror, the Salon very nearly disappeared, and it was only by dint of the repeated invitations and pressing appeals of the department of Public Instruction that the Salon was at last opened in October 1795. The exhibition was not important. The subjects of the pictures were the gloomy scenes of contemporary history and portraits of victims; and 'owing to the dearness of paper and of printing,' says a note of the time, very few criticisms of it were published. In 1796 we arrive at the time of the muscadins and merveilleuses, and the Salon became annual. In 1797, in the place of honour in all the exhibition rooms is seen, in the midst of a trophy of flags, the portrait of a pale young general with long hair who was at that time called citizen Buonaparte. In 1798, a grand reform; a jury of admission is elected, and begins to work regularly. In the Salon of 1800, we have Bonaparte served up with all sauces: the battle of Lodi,' 'the passage of the Po,' Portrait of the First Consul,' the General Consul Bonaparte driving a chariot with the rapidity of a hero who knows how to overcome all obstacles,' &c. The history of the Salon during the reign of Napoleon I. would of itself form a whole volume, not the least interesting chapters of which would be those devoted to the iconography of the emperor and his battles. The number of works exhibited had increased immensely. In 1791, at the last Academic Salon, the catalogue contained 321 numbers. In 1801, 268 exhibitors sent 485 works; in 1807, 360 exhibitors sent 699 works; in 1812, 557 exhibitors sent 1,299 works; and in 1814, 507 exhibitors sent 1,359 works. In 1804 a new era began, and Napoleon, in the interval between two battles, meditated the restoration of the arts. Unfortunately, in art even a Napoleon is powerless, and the school of the empire holds but an inferior place in the artistic history of France, in spite of the fame of its chief artists, David, Girodet, Gerard, and Gros. But the Salon remained popular, and the rhymed criticisms continued as in the past, and the portraitists of the emperor are treated as they deserve: Quoi! peintres sans talent, sans goût, Ce héros est couvert d'honneurs, A novelty, too, was introduced in criticism, and in the minor theatres pieces were played in which the pictures of the Salon were passed in review and discussed. Such pieces were 'Croutinet ou le Salon de Montargis,' 'Les Tableaux chez Séraphin,' 'Madame Angot au Muséum,' 'Les Portraits au Salon ou le Mariage imprévu.' This novelty did not last long. On May 4, 1814, 'Vive l'Empereur!' was succeeded by 'Vive le Roi!' The Salon opened in November, and by order of the king, in all the battle pictures the tricolour cocade was replaced by a cocade of spotless white; and with the same facility with which they had immortalised the saturnalia of the Revolution and the glories of the empire, the artists now celebrated the return of the Bourbons. Augustin exhibited portraits of Louis XVIII., the Duc de Berry, and the Duc d'Orléans; Bajetti, a view of the Tuileries at the moment of the entry of Louis XVIII.; Fremy, the Arrivée de son Altesse Royale Monsieur à Paris;' Carle Vernet, the Duc de Berry in lancer's uniform; Roben, Louis XVI. in Paradise receiving the Duc d'Enghien ;' Gros, François I. and Charles Quint visiting the Church of St. Denis.' 6 The events of 1815 prevented the opening of the Salon that year. The Salons of 1817, of 1822, and 1824 belong entirely to the history of contemporary painting. One Salon only was held at the Louvre during the reign of Charles X., that of 1827. The new names that succeed those of David and Gros are Géricault, Ingres, Horace Vernet, Léopold Robert, Foyatier, Delaroche. In 1824, the painters of the Romantic school were first represented at the Salon, Delacroix by his 'Massacre of Scio,' Ary Scheffer by his 'Gaston de Foix,' and Eugène Devéria by a Madonna-works which the critics of the time compared to canvases against which had been flung a sponge imbued with various colours. At the Salon of 1827 the Classicists were miserably beaten, and at the Salon of 1831 the triumph of the Romanticists was complete. 'The struggle is over,' wrote Gustave Planche; 'in another year, perhaps, the public will blush at the trivial pleasantries that it has listened to and repeated' concerning the great painters of the Romantic school. The Homeric struggle of the Romanticists and Classicists has been related by Théophile Gautier and others. We need not dwell upon it here, now that the war is over and the dispute settled for ever. Evidently we see now that truth, the artistic sense and intelligence of nature were on the side of the Romanticists, and it is from Constable and from the Romantic school that French landscape-painting dates-that landscapepainting of which Millet, Rousseau, Daubigny, and Corot are the glories. Meanwhile, what Rousseau did for landscape, Decamps did for the East and its figures, and this renaissance of art was explained to the public by critics whose names were Théophile Gautier, Gustave Planche, Alfred de Musset, Jules Janin, Charles Baudelaire. The era of criticism in couplets was at an end, and the serious criticism, of which Diderot had traced the lines, was carried to a degree of appreciative and descriptive delicacy that approached perfection. In the reign of Louis Philippe the Salon still took place in the Louvre, and the preparation of the galleries, together with the time of the duration of the exhibition, deprived the public of the enjoyment of the regular collections of the museum during five months of the year. The pictures of the Salon were hung on hoardings raised in front of the masterpieces of Raphael, Murillo, Rubens, and Poussin. Finally, after repeated complaints of the artists, and representations of the danger in which the old masters were placed by the erection and taking down of the scaffolding in 1849, the Salon was installed in the palace of the Tuileries, then uninhabited on account of the events of 1848. Alas! even then people were not satisfied. The palace of our kings is a detestable place for the Salon,' says a contemporary journal. 6 The gallantry of the Republic, otherwise very noble and very praiseworthy, will only have the advantage of obliging the construction of special galleries for the exhibition. The National Assembly has only to vote the funds if there still remain funds in the Treasury, and have built a new palace in the Place du Carrousel.' However, in this badly-lighted Salon of 1849, 2,586 artists exhibited; but amongst the names we look in vain for those of Ingres, Lehmann, Coignet, Ary Scheffer, Delaroche, &c., who evidently feared the promiscuity resulting from the decree that appeared in the ‘Moniteur' the day after the Revolution of 1848: All works sent this year to the Salon will be received without exception. "The citizen minister of the Interior, 'LEDRU-ROLLIN.' One of the great successes of the Salon of 1849 was a picture of terrible interest for the Parisians who had escaped from the cholera. The corpses, rigid, green, hideous, of a whole family are piled up on a hand-cart, the arms, heads, and legs, hanging over right and left. A woman drags the horrible load; it is the mother. A madman follows behind singing; it is the husband.' The Salons of 1850 and 1852 were held in a temporary construction in the Place du Carrousel; the jury was re-established, and for the first time the entrance was fixed at one franc. |