The Moment When Impressionism Took the Stage
Reconstructing the Paris art scene of 1874—including the legendary first Impressionist exhibition.
Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
through January 19, 2025
THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART trumpets Paris 1874 as a fresh look at “the radical 1874 exhibition considered the birth of modern painting.” But that understates the show’s ambition and achievement. Paris 1874 brings together 125 paintings, prints, sculptures, and pastels to present many of Impressionism’s emerging works alongside more traditional forms. It’s really, as the curators call it, “a tale of two exhibitions” from 150 years ago: the vast annual exhibition of the state-sponsored Paris Salon of 1874 and the smaller, independent display a mile away organized by a splinter group of artists for their freshly minted Société Anonyme.
In 1874, Paris was still reeling from what author Victor Hugo called the “terrible year” of 1870–71. Crushed by a humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, Parisians were further ravaged that year by civil war. With Napoleon III’s empire eradicated, a cadre of working- and middle-class people sparked revolt by organizing the Commune as a ruling body. But after only three months, a reconstituted French army savagely defeated the Commune’s forces. Much of central Paris, including the Tuileries, was burned and left in rubble. At least 10,000 people were killed.
In the wake of such devastation, the Parisian landscape offered prime turf for building the new. By 1874, the city was beginning to emerge from the ashes. And because this was Paris, art assumed a central role in revitalizing the city’s life. As Paris 1874 demonstrates, the competing exhibitions of 1874 illustrated how the advent of “the new” was intruding upon old-school tradition.
Jointly organized by the Musée d’Orsay and the National Gallery of Art, Paris 1874 begins with two paintings that convey the divergent strands of the contemporary Paris art world. Placed side by side in the entryway, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s L’Eminence Grise (1873) and Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872) are superb choices to launch the two tales. Gérôme’s painting, a highly detailed history genre painting, exemplifies the art of the state-sponsored Salon. Established in the seventeenth century, the Salon functioned as France’s “official” artistic sanctuary and kept a death grip on what art was “worthy” enough for display in its annual exhibitions. Acceptable paintings had to tell morally uplifting stories by using motifs in religion, mythology, or history, and they had to be huge—in scope of subject matter and in physical scale. Artists clamored for inclusion on the Salon’s lucrative stage. These Salons were what art critics paid attention to, and where buyers came with fat wallets. Much like the MGM studio in Golden Age Hollywood, the Paris Salon was a star-making machine.
In contrast, Impression, Sunrise—which has never before been brought to the United States—conveys what Monet saw when he looked out his window at the port of Le Havre. His brush captured a moment of transition at dawn, with the sun rising over ships at anchor, their masts poking into the mist, as fishermen work in small boats. But he also inserted smokestacks and construction cranes as potent signals that industry was poised to interrupt the harbor’s pastoral quiet. Monet caught a moment when life was visually morphing into a modern age.
Monet and such colleagues as Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet, and Berthe Morisot had been accepted into previous Salon shows. But the feeling grew among this group that the Salon’s rules were far too restrictive. The emerging modern world would require an openness to new artistic approaches. Thirty-one of them formed a joint-stock company to independently show and sell their work. On April 15, 1874, this group—calling itself the “Société Anonyme”—opened a one-month exhibit displaying 215 works of art in the photographic studio of Felix Nadar at 35 Boulevard des Capucines. Much of the art on display was experimental in both style and subject matter.
Financially, this first Société Anonyme show was a flop, with only some 3,500 visitors, just 320 catalogues purchased, and a mere four works of art sold. Some reviews were positive, as when Ernest Chesneau wrote “what a bugle call . . . how it resounds far into the future!” But there were scathing criticisms as well, most notably reviewer Louis Leroy writing in the influential art magazine Le Charivari that Monet’s loose brushstrokes in Impression, Sunrise were simply fleeting sensations—that his art was only for the moment and lacked lasting importance. Yet the title of Leroy’s review on April 25—“The Exhibition of the Impressionists”—intended to mock Monet’s work, instead was adopted as the name of the new movement, and gave the critic a lasting association he could never escape.
Two weeks later, the Salon opened its annual exhibition at the Palais de l’Industrie. There were 3,700 works presented by 2,000 artists. Some 300,000 paying visitors passed through the Palais’s doors, nearly 50,000 catalogues were purchased, and 116 works were sold. The exhibition was a smash hit, and Gérôme’s L’Eminence Grise was awarded the gold medal.
Yet change was in the air. Paris was reawakening, and by 1874 its growing economic vitality was fueled by a rising middle class. New money meant new markets, and a vanguard of nouveau riche Parisians sought the trendiest art around. They had little interest in the Salon’s traditional art, and flocked instead to buy the smaller, brightly colored, and much more affordable art created by the Impressionists.
The National Gallery’s Paris 1874 tells this complicated story well. The curators Mary Morton and Kimberly A. Jones don’t simply divide the exhibition into opposing art camps. What visitors see instead is an evolution, as many now-familiar Impressionist artists experimented to find their styles, themes, and modernist identities.
The exhibition is large, filling ten rooms with such themes as “Paris in Crisis,” “Suburban Leisure,” “Depictions of Faith,” and “Updating Tradition.” The section on “The Rise of Landscape” describes how the Impressionists brought landscape art to the forefront, and how plein air painting was made possible by such new inventions as portable paint tubes, small boxes for art supplies, and collapsible stools—all of which meant an artist could easily transport his tools outdoors to paint.
Most of all, Paris 1874 has wonderful art. Among the artists representing the Salon is Camille Cabaillot-Lassalle, who imagined a scene at the Salon itself—and cleverly asked a handful of other artists to paint miniature versions of their own real Salon paintings within his:
Auguste Lançon’s Dead in Line!—one of several Salon works to depict the violence of 1870—shows troops lining up in the background while the bodies of fallen soldiers are roughly lined up in the foreground.
Several of the Société Anonyme works on display here are among the most famous Impressionist paintings. Renoir’s The Parisian Girl is a vision in blue; he captures the many shades of her dress, a color that ordinary people could afford in clothing thanks to a recently invented indigo dye.
Renoir’s The Dancer is nearby, as is Degas’s The Ballet Rehearsal (pictured at the top of this article), an extraordinary tonal study in brown, gray, and white.
In several rooms, visitors will notice the overlap between the Salon and Société Anonyme. Indeed, a few artists—such as Giuseppe De Nittis and Antoine-Ferdinand Attendu—had works displayed in both shows in 1874. But the overall sense of Paris 1874, starting with that first juxtaposition of Gérôme’s L’Eminence Grise and Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, is of something distinct and fresh coming into being.
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