Paris Salon Research Articles

Maria Weston Chapman, French Salons, and Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

AbstractThis article examines the idea of anti-slavery sociability as part of a wider analysis of the informal elements of the transatlantic anti-slavery movement. It considers how American abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman drew support for the American anti-slavery cause from French salons during her time spent living in Paris from 1848 to 1855. This case-study highlights how a focus on the informal dimensions of anti-slavery activism illuminates the often underappreciated work of female abolitionists in the transatlantic reform sphere. Through the connections she established with the likes of French writer Victor Hugo and Russian exile Nicholas Tourgueneff at salons in Paris, most notably that of Mary Clarke Mohl on the Rue de Bac, Chapman was able to cultivate European support for abolitionism in myriad ways. This included financial donations, goods to be sold at anti-slavery bazaars, and, perhaps most importantly, testimonies against American slavery from renowned Europeans like Hugo that could be republished in the United States.

ZARKA LA DALMATE ET MELITZA LA MONTÉNÉGRINE, FIGURES INSOLITES DE L'IMAGINAIRE DE LEOPOLD SACHER-MASOCH – ENTRE HÉROÏNES MASOCHIENNES ET STÉRÉOTYPES ROMANTIQUES

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, a German-language writer, was a great star of French literary life. The famous Revue des deux mondes devoted considerable space to him by publishing ten short stories entitled Slavic Women (Femmes slaves) in the period from 1889 to 1891. Sacher-Masoch emphasized that French was hissecond mother tongue, and some sourcesindicate that he wrote and published his texts directly in French. We propose to analyze Zarka the Dalmatian from the short story of the same name and Melitza the Montenegrin from the short story “A Day in Gatzko” (La journée de Gatzko), two female characters from the literary world of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, presenting at the same time the atypical traits and stereotypes of the panoply of Slavic women placed at the center of the Masochian imagination. . Zarka and Melitza mix submission and intimate revolt in an oppressive environment for women; they integrate into it and keep their individualism while accepting and playing their model social and family roles. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch does not deprive them of the eroticism or romantic stereotypes specific to histime, while granting them a physical and moral finesse which protectsthem from the humiliations or violent and passionate reactions of their northern Slavic sisters. Neither of the two short stories contains masochistic elements as such, but they represent an essential contribution to the knowledge of Montenegrin and Dalmatian society of the 19th century,so close to each other and so distant to the visitorsto the Parisian salons which constitute the privileged audience of Leopold von Sacher Masoch. Despite partially substantiated criticisms of its colonial exoticism, Sacher-Masoch's study of Slavic women opens interesting avenues for feminist literary criticism.

Measuring nepotism and sexism in artistic recognition: the awarding of medals at the Paris Salon, 1850–1880

Measuring nepotism and sexism in artistic recognition: the awarding of medals at the Paris Salon, 1850–1880

A statistical analysis of the catalogues and criticism of the 19th-century Paris Fine Art Salon: The emergence of titling in the French art world

Abstract The dominant institution in the French art world for the display of new art for most of the 19th century was the Paris Salon. Artistic reputations depended upon showing works at the Salon, and critics made their names through writing about the event. In this article, statistical analysis of the contents and structure of the catalogues of the Salon and of Salon criticism is utilized to understand how the practice of titling new paintings emerged and was adopted in the 19th-century French art world. My work shows how statistical methods can be used to investigate practical and conceptual change, and problematizes accounts of the emergence of titling given by earlier authors. There are also methodological lessons for those working in the digital humanities from the approach adopted in this article.

“They paved the Atlantic with books”: William and Jenny Bradley, literary agents and cultural passeurs across borders

The William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records help trace the careers of William and Jenny Bradley, two intermediaries in the cultural exchanges between France and the United States in the twentieth century. The archive offers privileged access to an array of transatlantic negotiations in the interwar period and post-Second World War era. This article first aims at including the two agents into the communications circuit relevant to book history that unfolds from writer to editor and on to reader, at a time when the book industry became more international. The article then unveils the sociability rooted in the agents’ participation in the world of Parisian salons and in the building of literary and intellectual relationships in the transnational space of Paris. Ultimately, the article argues that the Bradleys’ lifework articulates cultures in ways that defy the simplified vision of a unidirectional flux in what has been suggested to be an “American Century” of influence and cultural domination. In sum, an interest in intermediation and a transnational approach bring together considerations over the professional contributions of the French-American literary agents and observations about little-known makers of cultural processes. This article draws from the manuscript of Deux agents littéraires dans le siècle américain : William et Jenny Bradley, passeurs culturels transatlantiques (Cossu-Beaumont, 2023) and hopefully serves to shed light on the journeys of William and Jenny Bradley as Atlantic passeurs.

Czego się bać w baśniach bez duchów i potworów? Rozważania o literackiej baśni francuskiej końca XVII wieku

Between 1690 and 1715, the literary fairy tale, the conte de fées, becomes fashionable in France, created by the regulars of Parisian salons and distinct from the folktale. The monster in the modern fairy tale is ridiculed, so that the fear it is supposed to inspire is apparent (the example of the tales of Madame d’Aulnoy and de Murat). Then, in two fairy tales (Le prince rosier by Catherine Bernard and Anguillette by Mrs de Murat), I analyse fears and anxieties that are rooted in love rather than evil spells. The pessimistic vision of love links the fairy tale with the novel of the late 17th century. Both are meant to transport the reader to another, distant world in order to portray the real world all the better. Contes de fées create an atmosphere of spiritual anxiety that has no connection with the enchanted world: no supernatural powers change human nature and the misery it leads to, and the sophisticated form and magical setting hide the true face of the world of feelings.

The Art of Imperial Maternity: Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, Empress Marie-Louise, and The King of Rome Sleeping

In 1811, Pierre-Paul Prud'hon painted an allegorical portrait of the infant Napoleon II for Empress Marie-Louise, Napoleon's second wife and the child's mother, that was exhibited publicly at the Paris Salon the following year. Prud'hon's painting is distinctive because it lacks conventional imperial attributes that characterized Napoleonic imagery at the time. On one level, the portrait can be understood according to Christian iconography or as an allegory of the new French order according to ancient Roman mythology. I argue, however, that Prud'hon subscribed to early nineteenth-century Romantic ideals, freely interpreting traditional artistic conventions to show the unity between childhood innocence, women, and nature. This pictorial approach appealed to Marie-Louise, who faced an increasingly unfavorable reputation in the wake of Napoleon's 1809 divorce and mounting public suspicion of the emperor's character. The empress utilized Prud'hon's romanticized image of her son to cast herself as the ideal Napoleonic woman and mother, thereby demonstrating her inherent virtue, reassuring the public of the empire's stability, and legitimizing her place at court on her own terms. Importantly, Prud'hon centralizes Marie-Louise's position as the heir's protector to imply her imperial significance—a dynamic role for the consort in this painting that has remained unexplored until now.

Dreams and Intertextuality in Chopin’s A-Minor Prelude

ABSTRACT This article focuses on a unique relationship that Chopin’s Prelude in A Minor, Op. 28, No. 2 shares with the Lieder of Franz Schubert. Proceeding from the topical analysis of the Prelude, I examine the role of the Parisian salon and the little-known influence of Schubert’s music on Chopin. I then present two songs by Schubert that, I will claim, function as hitherto unnoticed models for his prelude, and demonstrate how Chopin used the “cut and paste” technique to create a representation of a dream. This analytical reading is supported with concepts borrowed from narrativity, performativity, and Romantic interiority.

Contested Cosmopolitanism: William and Elizabeth A. Sharp’s Glasgow Herald Reviews of the Paris Salons 1884-1900

Discusses William Sharp's attempt as a fin-de-siecle art critic to accommodate local particularism and national identity within his "outsider" cosmopolitanism, through his contributions to The Evergreen and the regular reviews he and his wife Elizabeth A. Sharp wrote of the Paris Salons for the Glasgow Herald, unsigned but identifiable through their correspondence, and argues that these reviews show how "the Sharps resisted the growing tendency to see the particular and the cosmopolitan as irreconcilable opposites." .

Drawing Blanks: Word and Image at the Expositions des Incohérents

ABSTRACT In the early 1890s, Jules Lévy organised a series of artistic exhibitions under the title of Les Arts Incohérents. Affiliated with Montmartre cabaret culture, the events lampooned the conventions of the Parisian salons and the conventions and institutions of the fine arts. This article explores the importance of the figure of the blank in a selection of art exhibited by the Incohérents. Adopting a word-and-image-based approach, and drawing on theories of comedy and laughter, the article shows how the Incéohérents' incipient avant-gardism interrogates the limits of the different arts and points to a novel inflection of humour in the period.

An Idle Heroine in Industrious Times: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Story of Avis

An Idle Heroine in Industrious Times: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ <i>The Story of Avis</i>

Re-examining Salon Space: Structuring Audiences and Music at Parisian Receptions

AbstractHistorians have viewed nineteenth-century music salons in Paris as concert-like environments where performers and audience gathered in a designated music room. Architectural studies and first-hand accounts, however, show that the music salon incorporated multiple reception rooms, and that guests frequently listened to musical performances from adjoining spaces. While conceptual space has been a subject central to salon studies, this project analyses material space, re-evaluating how the architecture of the salon influenced audience structure, listening modes and compositional practices. This architecture was ultimately central to the development of salon opera, which flourished between 1850 and the 1870s and was epitomized by Gustave Nadaud’s Le docteur Vieuxtemps (1854).

Proust on the Beach

What becomes visible when we consider À la recherche du temps perdu from the vantage point of the beach? This article contends that Proust's beach resort, Balbec, stages a reconfiguration of social ritual and corporeal style. Balbec is both an enormous casino and the ‘springboard’ for a loosely scripted, habit-disrupting social choreography. In contrast to both the aristocratic salons of Paris and the bourgeois family nucleus that characterizes Combray, Proust's beach is an improvisatory space. As such, it facilitates place-based, contingent (rather than congenital) forms of queer movement and desire.

The changing faces of the Paris salon: Using a new dataset to analyze portraiture, 1740 –1881

This essay describes a novel dataset that facilitates the quantitative analysis of eighteenth and nineteenth-century French painting. Based on titles listed in the Paris Salon livrets, the dataset assigns detailed keywords indicating the content for each of the more than 148,000 paintings shown at the Salon—the principal French art exhibition of the era—from the seventeenth to nineteenth century. To demonstrate the interest and utility of this dataset, we present a case study about a genre that has traditionally been neglected by both art historians and cultural economists: portraiture. Our analysis shows portraiture was ubiquitous, usually representing 27% of all paintings exhibited in a year—more than any other genre. We also trace the changing demographics of sitters. There were, for example, dramatic increases over time in how many images of women were displayed. We also chart the rise of quasi-anonymous portraiture, where names of sitters do not appear in paintings’ titles but audiences from certain social classes could identify subjects. We ultimately demonstrate how quantitative methods can be fruitfully applied to this art historical dataset, which is now available freely online, and is just one of many similar datasets that can be digitized and studied.

Stylistic Duality in Gabriel Fauré's Music for Pauline Viardot's Salon

When Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) became a ‘regular’ at the Parisian salon of opera legend Pauline Viardot in 1871, he encountered businessmen and politicians in addition to aristocrats and socialites, plus artists and authors as well as amateur musicians and professional peers. Encouraged by Madame Viardot and inspired by her ‘artistic salon’, Fauré produced sophisticated works with stylistic duality: music that appealed to and satisfied both intuitive and analytic listeners.This essay examines three of Fauré's compositions that feature stylistic duality, each dedicated to a member of the Viardot family. These include two early mélodies, ‘Chanson du pêcheur (Lamento)’ (1872) and ‘Au bord de l'eau’ (1875), plus the Romance pour violon (1877). It demonstrates that these pieces, which sought to engage a diverse audience and involve each member in an individualized and interactive aesthetic experience, reveal considerable sophistication below their immediately attractive surfaces. This article also avers that abandonment of misconceptions and prejudices is essential to full appreciation of Gabriel Fauré's refined and innovative art.

Politics, Fashion and Female Agency in Parisian Salons c. 1800: The Case of Juliette Récamier

During her lifetime, Juliette Récamier (1777-1849) was widely considered as the most beautiful woman in France. Within the country’s post-revolutionary Directory and Consulate epoch, Récamier ran a salon that boasted prominent political figures and writers among its frequent guests. Récamier’s own legacy however is one of seemingly total passivity: praise aside, the impression we are left with is one of placid docility. Récamier was greatly admired, yet incapable of articulating her own thoughts and ideas.&amp;nbsp;This article examines François Gérard’s portrait of Récamier. At the time, Gérard (1770-1837) was one of the period’s most successful artists, whose services Napoléon would request for his coronation portrait in 1805. Gérard’s work leads to this study’s argument that the articulation and presentation of self image in the early nineteenth century was no less layered and complex than the creation of material images. In fact, it illustrates just how much Gérard’s portrait is an image of her making as much as it is of his. We see such agency further mediated in Récamier’s shawl dance, a performative staple of the soirées she hosted. Imbuing the artistic virtues associated with neoclassical dress with the passion, sensuality, and individualistic nature of dance; this article considers Récamier’s self-fashioning on a stage exclusively within her salon.

Politics, Fashion and Female Agency in Parisian Salons c. 1800: The Case of Juliette Récamier

During her lifetime, Juliette Récamier (1777-1849) was widely considered as the most beautiful woman in France. Within the country’s post-revolutionary Directory and Consulate epoch, Récamier ran a salon that boasted prominent political figures and writers among its frequent guests. Récamier’s own legacy however is one of seemingly total passivity: praise aside, the impression we are left with is one of placid docility. Récamier was greatly admired, yet incapable of articulating her own thoughts and ideas.&amp;nbsp;This article examines François Gérard’s portrait of Récamier. At the time, Gérard (1770-1837) was one of the period’s most successful artists, whose services Napoléon would request for his coronation portrait in 1805. Gérard’s work leads to this study’s argument that the articulation and presentation of self image in the early nineteenth century was no less layered and complex than the creation of material images. In fact, it illustrates just how much Gérard’s portrait is an image of her making as much as it is of his. We see such agency further mediated in Récamier’s shawl dance, a performative staple of the soirées she hosted. Imbuing the artistic virtues associated with neoclassical dress with the passion, sensuality, and individualistic nature of dance; this article considers Récamier’s self-fashioning on a stage exclusively within her salon.

“The Future of Women Is the Future of the Nation”: Marie-Élisabeth Cavé’s Drawing Manuals and Art Education in Nineteenth-Century France

French artist Marie-Élisabeth Cavé (ca. 1809–83) was a successful watercolorist whose works were frequently exhibited at the Parisian Salons and whose art manual Le dessin sans maitre: Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner de mémoire (1850; Drawing without a Master: The Cavé Method for Learning to Draw from Memory, 1868) achieved wide acclaim with multiple editions in the nineteenth century. Yet Cavé has not received much scholarly attention today. This article recovers the history of Cavé and repositions her as an agent of her own success. The simplicity and autonomy of her novel technique, which used repetition to cultivate visual memory, permitted students of all backgrounds to learn to draw. According to artist Eugène Delacroix, Cavé’s method was the only one that could meet the demands of a growing industrial nation. Remarkably, within these treatises, Cavé marshaled the medium of the art manual to inscribe her own ideas about women’s education and work, and to encourage women in nineteenth-century France to become professional artists.

The “Demarcation Problem” in Science: What Has Enlightenment Got to Do with It? Part I

Steven Pinker’s recent Enlightenment Now (2018) aside, Enlightenment values have been in for a rough ride of late. Following Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s critique of Enlightenment as the source of fascism, recent studies, amplified by Black Lives Matter, have laid bare the ugly economic underbelly of Enlightenment. The prosperity that enabled intellectuals to scrutinize speculative truths in eighteenth-century Paris salons relied on the slave trade and surplus value extracted from slave labor on sugar plantations and in other areas Europeans controlled. Indeed, deprived of its ugly economic underbelly, Enlightenment was barely conceivable; furthermore, its reliance on surplus value extraction from oppressed labor was accompanied by a racism that, with the exception of the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and a few other thinkers, was arguably inherent to Enlightenment. However, I am not proposing yet another revelation of Enlightenment’s complicity in exploitation of, or disregard for, the Other. Rather, I want to highlight the damage being done today by an insidious strategy of labelling as “pseudo-science” entire domains of non-Western knowledge such as Chinese medicine and Ayurveda, thereby rendering them no-go zones for serious minds. Even though the term pseudo-science had yet to be coined, the beginnings of this tendency are already evident in Enlightenment-era works such as Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s Description … de la Chine (1735). The perpetuation of this dismissive treatment of non-Western natural knowledge creates a significant obstacle to superseding a “scientific revolution” whose confines have long been burst: it is increasingly recognized that traditional/indigenous knowledge affords a vast reservoir of materials, skills and insights of which the world has desperate need, no more urgently than in response to the covid-19 pandemic.

Searching for Vance Lowry: “Banjo King” and “A Kind of Parisian Figure”

Abstract The life stories of traveling people reveal hidden historiographical connections and serve as allegories for broader cultural patterns. This biographical portrait of African American banjo player Vance Lowry tracks a path from the Appalachian Mountains to the avant-garde salons of 1920s Paris. As a figure on the vanguard of cultural change, Lowry’s knowledge was absorbed by like-minded white people on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet he has been remembered only as a person who influenced the vanguard—if he has been remembered at all. If histories of the white avant-garde have emphasized the ruptures of modernism, this account of Vance Lowry’s life, family, and career point to its continuities. Namely, that Black materials fashioned American culture and the culture of the modern world. In tracing this tradition, the article chronicles the shifting place of the banjo in the modern imagination, while disassembling systems of white patronage that sustained Vance Lowry’s performing life but relegated him to a footnote in annals of modernism.