Today’s blockbuster museum exhibitions are a sideshow compared with the Paris Salon.
Most modern large exhibitions at the Met or the Louvre display between 100 and 150 paintings. The Salon hung as many as 5,318 works (1887), making it about 50 times larger.
If you took all the paintings and lined them up side by side along a highway, frame touching frame, they would stretch for six or eight miles.
The proper term was “The Exhibition of Living Artists.” After 1855 it opened in the Palais des Champs-Elysees, a vast warehouse-like space.
The Salon opened during the first week in May. Admission was one franc, well within the means of working people. As a result, the appreciation for Salon artwork cut across all social classes, as movies do today.
The paintings were grouped by the letter of the artists’ last name, so Manet, Monet, and Meissonier shared a room. Popular paintings were accompanied by guards to keep people from trampling each other.
Paris had a population of around 1.4 million in the later part of the 19th century. Of that number, about a million people visited the exhibition at least once during its six-week run. About 23,000 visitors passed through the doors on average each day.
By comparison, amongst of the best attended shows at the Met were the Leonardo da Vinci and the El Greco exhibitions. Each of those averaged less than 7,000 people per day, a mere third of the Salon’s attendance.
Adapted from The Judgment of Paris: The Decade that Gave Us Impressionism, By Ross King, link. and The Studios of Paris, by John Milner, link.
Image courtesy Bearded Roman, link.