How Painters Bypassed the Official Salon in the 19th Century
- Art d'Histoire
- May 28
- 5 min read
The Origins of the Art Market
The Parisian art scene of the nineteenth century is often perceived through the lens of a binary confrontation between the rigid academicism of the official Salon and the brilliant rebellion of the Impressionists in 1874.
Historical reality is much more nuanced. Numerous alternative exhibition spaces had existed alongside the Salon since the end of the 18th century.
In parallel with the exhibition system managed by the State—that is, by the Academy and its Salon—a system, motivated by the need to sell a growing artistic production, had progressively unfolded.
The history of modernity chooses to remember only the Salon des Refusés of 1863 and the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, but whether through voluntary erasure or not, alternatives certainly existed, even if the Salon maintained a monopoly on prestige.
The Necessity of a Commercial Outlet
The control of access to the Salon, via the veto power of the Salon jury, had pushed the market toward parallel circuits.
The art historian Jean-Paul Bouillon identifies several forms of organisation around which this new art economy was structured. Painting was no longer considered solely for its aesthetic value, but gradually acquired the status of a commodity requiring new distribution networks.
He distinguishes three types of parallel circuits: amateur societies, which had existed since 1789; charitable associations since 1844; and associations between artists and dealers since 1862; to these were added private galleries, notably that of Martinet on the Boulevard des Italiens.
Amateur Societies
Starting in 1789 and under the impetus of the architect Charles de Wailly, amateur societies were born. These groups established an innovative system of subscription: members paid a fee that allowed for the purchase of canvases, which were then distributed through a lottery system.
This method of crowdfunding, ahead of its time, met with real success in the provinces, creating a decentralised and efficient exhibition network.
To this were linked the many 19th-century circles, including the Cercle des Mirlitons on Place Vendôme, the Cercle des Arts on Rue Choiseul, etc.
Subsequently, mixed structures were established, justified by key administrative figures like Charles Blanc. It fell to the State to restrict its role to that of guarantor for major commissions; private initiatives would handle daily sales, which were alone capable of absorbing the current production of the studios and meeting a growing demand.
Without imposing a stylistic dogma, venues like the Société des Arts Unis, which fell within this movement, exhibited side-by-side very different artistic sensibilities.
The Rise of Mutualism
By the middle of the century, alternatives became more professional.
In 1844, the Baron Taylor Foundation introduced a new mutualist model aimed at financially supporting artists through moderate contributions and the organisation of prestigious events. The success of this approach was such that it managed to attract major figures of academicism, such as the painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who participated in the Bazar Bonne Nouvelle exhibition in 1846, even though he had been boycotting official bodies for several years.
The foundation organised the posthumous exhibition of the academic draughtsman Ary Scheffer in1859, but in association with the dealers Martinet and Petit at the new space at 26 Boulevard des Italiens, which would become the famous Martinet gallery where Édouard Manet would exhibit as early as 1861.
The Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, founded in 1862, was certainly its most accomplished form. As Théophile Gautier noted, the realism of Gustave Courbet's The Stone Breakers, judged as brutal, sat without drama near the very academic Jesus Among the Doctors by Ingres.
To the Société should be added that of the Aquafortistes, created in 1862 with Alfred Cadart, which allowed for the exhibition of many engravings, including those of Manet and Bracquemond. The adventure of the Aquafortistes was short-lived, as it was declared bankrupt in 1867, but not before reviving the market for etchings in France.
These initiatives also allowed works to circulate in the provinces and fostered the development of a specialised press.
Individual Emancipation and the Retrospective
The desire to escape the system of state rewards and privileges also pushed artists to organize themselves, a move praised by the critic René Ménard, who saw in it the emergence of free associations based on aesthetic affinities.
A new format of the monographic retrospective was born with studio sales, becoming opportunities for the renewed promotion of a deceased artist—the tribute paid to Eugène Delacroix in 1864 at the Martinet gallery on Boulevard des Italiens, following those of Ingres, Delaroche, or Flandrin, was part of this.
Some precursors had not, moreover, waited for these commercial structures to monetise access to their works. The great and very classical Jacques-Louis David charged an entry fee to see his Sabines at the Louvre—a space which, by definition, should not have been a commercial space but a noble one—while Théodore Géricault had organised lucrative tours in the United Kingdom for his Raft of the Medusa.
Naturally, a critic as conservative as Louis Auvray welcomed the bankruptcy of many of these independent enterprises—vile "English-style" exhibitions that turned works of art into circus products—but the historical process had been set in motion and was already irreversible.
Over the course of the century, the official Salon retained only the monopoly on prestige, definitively losing the monopoly on the visibility of works. To this list should be added individual exhibition ventures, whether they were artists opening their studios or Courbet and Manet organising their own pavilions in competition with official exhibitions.
Economic liberalism had thus redrawn the boundaries of artistic exhibition in the French style, paving the way for future Impressionists and independent artists.
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