The Salon of the Rejected: Paris, 1863, and the Best Marketing Decision an Emperor Ever Made by Accident

For most of the nineteenth century, if you were a painter in France and you wanted a career rather than a hobby, there was really only one door, and it was guarded by a committee. The Paris Salon was the annual state-sponsored exhibition run under the authority of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and its jury — a rotating panel of established, conservative painters — decided each spring which works would be displayed and which would simply vanish back into their creators' studios, unseen, unsold, and unremarked upon. Getting into the Salon wasn't a nice bonus for an artist. It was close to the only mechanism by which a painter could be noticed at all, and the jury knew it, and used that leverage to enforce a fairly narrow set of tastes: finished surfaces, correct anatomy, historical or mythological subjects treated with appropriate solemnity, nothing that looked unfinished or, worse, argued with the viewer.

The jury of 1863 was unusually severe, even by its own standards. Of roughly five thousand works submitted that year, something on the order of three in five were rejected outright — a rejection rate high enough that it stopped being a private disappointment for individual painters and became, almost overnight, a public grievance with a shape and a volume. Artists complained. They complained to newspapers, to each other, and eventually to the Ministry of Fine Arts, loudly enough that word of the fuss reached Emperor Napoleon III himself.

What the Emperor did next is one of those historical decisions that reads, depending on your mood, as either shrewd political theater or genuine curiosity, and possibly both at once. Rather than overrule his own jury, he decreed that the rejected works be given their own exhibition, in rooms adjacent to the official Salon, so that the public could see what had been turned away and judge the jury's taste for itself. It was framed as an act of transparency and fairness. It functioned, in practice, as one of the more effective pieces of unintentional marketing in the history of French art, because nothing draws a crowd quite like the promise of being allowed to laugh at something the authorities have already declared unacceptable.

And the crowds came — in numbers that, by several contemporary accounts, rivaled or exceeded the official Salon itself, though the vast majority arrived to mock rather than to appreciate. The undisputed center of the ridicule was Édouard Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, a picnic scene showing two fully dressed men seated in a forest clearing alongside a nude woman who looks directly out at the viewer with no allegorical alibi whatsoever — no goddess's name to hide behind, no mythological framing device to make the nudity respectable in the way the Salon's approved nudes always were. The public understood immediately that this was a provocation, and reacted the way provocations are generally rewarded: with outrage that guaranteed the painting would be discussed at every dinner table in Paris for months, which is a fairly good trade if you're the painter.

The Salon des Refusés as a spectacle was, by most measures, a bit of a circus, and critics of the day enjoyed feeling superior to it in print. But something quieter and more durable was happening underneath the mockery. For the first time, a large segment of the Parisian public had been given the chance to look at rejected work without a jury pre-filtering their opinion, and what a fair number of them discovered — even amid all the jeering — was that the establishment's taste and objective quality were not, in fact, the same thing. The jury had been protecting a set of conventions, not a floor of competence, and once that distinction became visible in public, it was hard to fully un-see.

The longer consequence took a decade to arrive, but it was significant: in 1874, a group of painters that included several veterans of the 1863 scandal organized an independent exhibition entirely outside the Salon system, funding and hanging it themselves. That show is now remembered as the first Impressionist exhibition. It existed because a precedent had already been set, nine years earlier, that an alternative to the juried Salon could draw an audience — even a hostile one — and that hostility itself was not necessarily fatal to an artist's future. The old system of state-sanctioned gatekeeping did not collapse overnight, but it had been shown, publicly and repeatedly, to have a losing record.

The final irony is the kind art history seems to specialize in: the paintings that had been humiliated in the Salon des Refusés — Manet's picnic among them, along with work by Whistler and Cézanne — are now visited, reproduced, and argued about far more than the great majority of paintings that the 1863 jury actually approved and hung with pride in the rooms next door. Ask most people today to name a prizewinner from that year's official Salon, and you will get silence. Ask them about the picnic painting that scandalized Paris, and you'll get an answer almost every time. The jury, it turns out, made its selections in good faith and by the lights of its era. History simply kept a different scorecard.