THE SALON AND THE ART TRADE: GENRE PAINTING AND THE VALUE OF ART For young French painters in the i86os, the annual Paris Salon was by far the most important showcase for their work. Critics' reviews of the Salon offer the most significant commentaries on contemporary art in nineteenth-century France. At the same time, though, alternative outlets for paintings were rapidly emerging, particularly through the growing number of art dealers in Paris. Renoir regularly submitted his most ambitious pictures to the Salon in these years; he had two paintings accepted by the jury in 1870. La Promenade, however, was not intended for the Salon. Although the work's early history is unknown, the likelihood is that Renoir painted it in hopes of a sale through a dealer. The Salon served two radically different functions. This govern- ment-organized event was intended to present the most elevated forms of con- temporary art—art that tackled significant themes, such as morality or heroism, and treated them in a sufficiently generalized way to raise them above everyday reality. But the Salon also served as a marketplace; many of the pictures shown there were designed to attract private collectors, whose tastes, most commenta- tors agreed, were for genre paintings—for trivial, familiar subjects treated in a meticulously illusionistic technique. The popularity of genre painting went back a long way—to the medievalizing "troubadour" scenes of the early years of the century and to the spate of paintings of peasant subjects from the 18205 on, ranging from the ideal- izing Italianate figures by artists such as Leopold Robert to the humble French scenes of Adolphe Leleux and, later, Jean-Fran£ois Millet. By the i86os even academically trained painters such as Jean-Leon Gerome were treating historical subjects in anecdotal, semihumorous ways that critics saw as more appropriate to Figure 2 Jean-Leon Gerome genre, as in Cleopatra and Caesar [FIGURE 2], shown at the 1865 Salon. Another (French, 1824-1904). academic painter, William Bouguereau, had virtually abandoned mythological Cleopatra and Caesar, 1865. Oil on canvas, and religious subjects—because they were so difficult to sell—in favor of ideal- 183 x 129.5 cm (72 x 51 in.). Sold Sotheby's, 6 New York, 23 May 1990, ized peasant themes, such as The Rustic Toilette of 1869 [FIGURE 3]. In 1867 lot 48. Courtesy of most of the medals awarded at the Paris Exposition Universelle were given to Sotheby's, Inc., New York. 5