A watershed moment in the controversy came about when complaints reached such a pitch that Emperor Napoleon III established a one-time Salon des Refusés in 1863 to put on public view within the official Salon the art rejected by the jury. This move would eventually lead to a weakening of the hegemony of the official Salon and would be followed by an increasing number of exhibitions organized independently.
Claude Monet Impression: Sunrise 1872 oil on canvas 19 x 25” Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
One of these was the so-called“ First Impressionist Exhibition” of 1874, held in the studio of a photographer who called himself Nadar, when works by Monet, Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Degas, Sisley, Cezanne, and Pissarro were first publicly shown together. The title is a misnomer because by no means could all of the thirty artists in the exhibition could be termed“ Impressionists,” but it was on this occasion that Claude Monet’ s Impression: Sunrise, led critic Louis Leroy derisively to coin the name“ Impressionism,” and it stuck.
One of my purposes in this essay was to set up some comparisons between works in the Salons from which the Impressionists were excluded and works by the accepted Salon artists during the same years, so that readers could judge for themselves. As far as I know, there has never been a published comparison of artworks from these Salons set side by side with those of the Impressionists. This would be in keeping with the rallying cry behind the independent exhibitions that followed in the aftermath of the Salon des Refusés: essentially,“ Just let our work be shown and let the public decide!”
Even with all the documents now available, this was not an easy task. Of the thirty artists and 165 works in the 1874 exhibition mentioned above, only a relative few are well documented so it is difficult to locate or identify many of them.
Édouard Manet( 1832-1883) Luncheon on the Grass 1863 Oil on canvas 82 x 104” Musée d’ Orsay, Paris
The painting was shown in the Salon catalogue with the title Le Bain( The Bath). In the midst of public furor, writer and critic Émile Zola( 1840-1902) came to the artist’ s defense, calling it“ the greatest work of Édouard Manet... This nude woman has scandalized the public... What indecency: a woman without the slightest covering between two clothed men! That has never been seen. And this belief is a gross error, for in the Louvre there are more than fifty paintings in which are found mixes of persons clothed and nude. But no one goes to the Louvre to be scandalized. The crowd has kept itself moreover from judging The Luncheon on the Grass like a veritable work of art should be judged.”
Paul Baudry( 1828-1886) The Wave and the Pearl 1862 oil on canvas 33 x 70” Museo del Prado, Madrid
By contrast with Manet ' s Luncheon on the Grass, while Baudry ' s picture received criticism for its sensuality, it was well received by the public and Empress Eugénie bought the painting. The catalogue of the Salon of 1863 had 2,923 entries, of which 2,127 were paintings. The critic Théophile Gautier called it the Salon of Venuses because it contained so many female nudes. In his critique of the Salon of 1863, Arthur Stevens, who classified the painting as a“ Venus,” mainly complained that what Baudry ' s painting lacked was“ life, blood, and warmth.” Something in common between the two paintings is that both have puzzling perspective. In Luncheon the woman wearing a chemise, who is getting out of the water, is clearly out of scale. If she came up to join the company she would be nine feet tall. Similarly, it is hard to tell where the wave is in relation to the woman lying on the sand. Is it about to sweep her away?
42 ART CHOWDER MAGAZINE