The Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Musée d'Orsay
Exhibition themes: The art of elegance
As Paris emerged from France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, and the tattered power structures of the dismantled Second Empire transformed themselves into the new and extremely conservative political machinery of the Third Republic, social appearances still held sway. The same was true of the art world and its organization and hierarchies, which in many respects still clung to pre-war values.
The annual Paris Salon was the testing ground for all artists, and thus their main hope for attracting the attention of the upper middle class and aristocratic clients who might purchase their work. For artists exhibiting at the Salon, it was expected that their works display a requisite level of finish, as well as a certain decorum of content. The capriciousness of the Salon's jury, however, was a source of continuing rancour for the young artists who would later unite into the Impressionist group, as they frequently saw their paintings accepted for exhibition at the Salon in one year, and inexplicably rejected the next.
Other artists, whose work managed to straddle the aesthetic tightrope between being conservative enough to pass the Salon jury, yet still progressive enough to ensure for them a lasting place in history, fared better in the official channels. Jean Béraud, an artist who counted members of the aristocracy and other rich patrons among his clients, exhibited at the Salons from 1873 to 1889, when he became a member of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, a breakaway alternative (but still somewhat conservative) Salon that emerged in Paris in 1890. James Tissot, after a long and successful career at the Paris Salons, moved to London in 1871, where he found a new audience at the annual Royal Academy exhibitions for his graceful evocations of Victorian life.
Berthe Morisot, on the other hand, showed works in all but one of the eight Impressionist exhibitions held in Paris between 1874 and 1886 (the exception being 1879, when she was recovering from childbirth). Like Renoir, Morisot's subjects were also primarily figurative, although often painted out of doors; but they were somewhat more confined in scope than those of Renoir, due to the constraints of her gender and class. A core member of the Impressionist group since its inception in December 1873, she had also been actively involved in organizing their exhibitions.
