For much of the 18th and 19th centuries, there was no more powerful institution in the art world than the Paris Salon. Established formally in 1667 under the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, it began as a showcase for the Academy’s own members before gradually becoming, by the 1800s, the most important annual event in the Western art world. To win a medal at the Salon meant securing commissions and collectors, and forging a stronger career path.
The Academy that governed it demanded several elements from artwork, including technical refinement, moral seriousness and subjects drawn from history or myth. Those standards produced astonishing work, and just as reliably, resistance. What broke the institution was cumulative – Napoleon III opened a parallel exhibition in 1863 to house the works its jury had rejected, while the Impressionists began organising their own shows through the 1870s. The jury-free Salon des Indépendants arrived in 1884, and, by the end of the century, the Academy’s monopoly on taste was gone.
Before that rupture, though, the Salon was where the serious painters were – while all four below are worth getting acquainted with, each offers a unique joy upon discovery.
1. William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905)
Glowing and seamless, Bourguereau’s 19th century portraits offered a mix of mythological figures and peasant girls rendered with a hallucinatory aura. After winning the Prix de Rome aged 25, he became one of the most celebrated painters in France and was later dismissed by the modernists so thoroughly that his reputation spent most of the 20th century in storage. That rehabilitation has been well underway for some time, and rightly so. Whatever one makes of the subject matter, the technical achievement is staggering.
2. Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904)
Gérôme travelled extensively in Egypt, Turkey, Palestine and the American West, and brought back paintings his contemporaries received as documents but that scholars now read as complicated fictions. His Orientalist canvases are visually extraordinary and historically fraught in roughly equal measure, which is why they remain so interesting. Later in his career, he turned to polychrome sculpture, questioning the boundary between painting and object.
3. Henri Regnault (1843-1871)
Regnault is the discovery here, and one of the more heartbreaking figures in 19th-century French art. He won the Prix de Rome in 1866 and spent the following years producing portraits and historical paintings of fierce colour – his Summary Execution Under the Moorish Kings of Granada, painted at 27, has the impressive scale of a history painting. He died that same year, shot during the Siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War. Very little about him has been written in English, which makes encountering his work for the first time feel like a refreshing find.
3. Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884)
Associated with the beginnings of Naturalism, Bastien-Lepage spent much of his short career painting the rural landscapes and labouring figures of his native Lorraine with an attention to light and atmosphere that pointed toward plein air painting. His influence on the generation that followed him, particularly in Britain and Scandinavia, was considerable. Émile Zola’s intriguing perspective on Bastien-Lepage’s art is “impressionism corrected, sweetened and adapted to the taste of the crowd.”
