The Intervention of the Sabine Women

~In the tense weeks after Marat’s death, Girodet’s Endymion finally went on public display in Paris at the Salon of 1793. The exhibition opened on 10 August, the first anniversary of the monarchy’s downfall in the storming of the Tuileries palace by the forces of the Parisian sans-culottes. Only two days before, the...

On 30 Frimaire, Year VIII of the French Republic (21 December 1799), the former premises of the abolished academy of architecture at the Louvre reopened for an unusual public display of a single painting...

~THE UNCOMMON heroism of a Hector or a Germanicus, the noble tears of an Andromache or an Agrippina—such high moments from...

~~The eighteenth century sees the definitive politicization of art, which would ultimately come to play a role in the wrenching events of the French Revolution. Louis XIV’s takeover of the art establishment in the service of the state, beginning around 1660, laid the foundation for what followed. Crucial to Louis’s...

When Napoleon and his French army invaded Egypt in 1798, a proclamation explained their motives to the inhabitants. Napoleon’s army had come to protect French merchants from harassment and to liberate Egyptians from the yoke of Mameluke tyranny...

Alfred-Philippe Roll first showed The Strike of the Miners at the Paris Salon of 1880 (fig. 58). Having won a first-class medal three years before, he was allowed to hang his large canvas outside the competition in the main entrance hall, where it garnered widespread attention from critics and the public alike.See Gabriel P. Weisberg, Beyond Impressionism: The Naturalist Impulse (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 97–99; Olivier Le Bihan et al., Alfred Roll, 1846–1919: Le Naturalisme en question, exh. cat. (Paris: Somogy, 2007); and Camille Baillargeon, “1880: Des mineurs en grève au Salon ou de l’influence de la peinture sur les acquis sociaux,” Analyse de l’IHOES [Institut d’Histoire Ouvrière, Économique et Sociale] 29 (31 November 2007), accessed 20 August 2014,...

Among many ways in which I might have defined the historical afterlife of Winckelmann’s work, I have deliberately singled out two very loaded engagements with his image of the Greek ideal, the first connected with the politics of the 1789 French Revolution and the second with late nineteenth-century aestheticism and definitions of homosexual identity. In each instance, a distinctive combination of historical circumstances made Winckelmann’s conception of Greek art particularly compelling as the …

Books about modernism tend to go in for inaugural dates. It all began in the 1820s, they say, or with Courbet setting up his booth outside the Exposition Universelle in 1855, or the year Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du Mal were put on trial, or in room M of the Salon des Refusés. “An important component in historical sequences of artistic events,” writes George Kubler, “is an abrupt change of content and expression at intervals when an entire language of form suddenly falls into …