Salon (Paris)

In 1667, the royally sanctioned French institution of art patronage, the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture[1] (a division of the Académie des beaux-arts), held its first semi-public art exhibit at the Salon Carré.

The Salon's original focus was the display of the work of recent graduates of the École des Beaux-Arts, which was created by Cardinal Mazarin, chief minister of France, in 1648.

Exhibition at the Salon de Paris was essential for any artist to achieve success in France for at least the next 200 years.

The jostling of artwork became the subject of many other paintings, including Pietro Antonio Martini's Salon of 1785.

The French salon, a product of the Enlightenment in the early 18th century, was a key institution in which women played a central role.

The Salon of 1824 was noted for its displays of British paintings by John Constable, Thomas Lawrence and Richard Parkes Bonington.

The vernissage (varnishing) of opening night was a grand social occasion, and a crush that gave subject matter to newspaper caricaturists like Honoré Daumier.

The increasingly conservative and academic juries were not receptive to the Impressionist painters,[5] whose works were usually rejected, or poorly placed if accepted.