The Paris Fine Art Salon/Le Salon, 1791-1881

Following on from « Ce Salon à quoi tout se ramène »: Le Salon de peinture et de sculpture, 1791–1890, published in 2010 as an earlier volume in this series, this volume contains a selection of the papers given at the first major international conference to be held on the post-1789 Paris Fine Art Salon. Hosted by the University of Exeter in September 2013, the conference had its origins in the research project entitled Painting for the Salon? The French State, Artists and Academy, 1830–1852, funded in 2010–2012 by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, and its purpose was to situate findings of this research within the wider framework of the Salon’s nineteenth-century history. In this collection of twenty-three papers, fourteen in English, nine in French, established and new scholars of French art history examine the national and international artistic, political and cultural dimensions of the most important regular exhibition of contemporary art in the nineteenth-century world.

James Kearns is Emeritus Professor of French Nineteenth-Century Studies in the University of Exeter. He has written extensively on French art criticism, with particular reference to the Paris Fine Art Salon and the art journalism of Theophile Gautier. He is currently one of the team of researchers producing the first critical edition of Gautier’s reviews of the Salon between 1833 and 1872.
Alister Mill completed his doctoral thesis on the Third-Republic Salon painter Alfred Philippe Roll at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where he subsequently spent four years as Visiting Lecturer. As Associate Research Fellow at the University of Exeter he co-produced with Dr Harriet Griffiths and in association with the Louvre’s Archives des Musees Nationaux the online Database of Salon Artists (salonartists.org), and curated the exhibition The Paris Fine Art Salon, 1791–1881.