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The salon is a 17th century French idea, a gathering of stimulating and attractive people of quality under the roof of an inspiring hostess, partly to amuse one another and partly to refine their taste and increase their knowledge through conversation and readings, consciously following Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "to please and educate" (aut delectare aut prodesse est).
The first literary salons of Paris formed in the 1620s at the Hôtel de Rambouillet by Madame de Rambouillet and the rival salon that gathered around Madeleine de Scudéry. Here gathered the original "blue-stockings" (les bas-bleues), whose nickname continued to mean "intellectual woman" for the next 300 years. In the salons of Paris, the précieuses refined the French language even before the Académie Francaise was founded.
The 18th century salons brought together Parisian society and the progressive philosophes who were producing the Encyclopédie, Marmontel remarks about Julie de Lespinasse suggest the secret of the salon in French culture:
- "The circle was formed of persons who were not bound together. She had taken them here and there in society, but so well assorted were they that once there they fell into harmony like the strings of an instrument touched by an able hand."
Such a woman in German circles, inspiring to writers and artists, perhaps without an artistic bent herself, was called a muse.
Paris salons of the 18th century:
The 19th-century salons were more inclusive, verging on the raffish, and centered around painters and "literary lions" such as Mme Récamier.
A more public Salon of another kind also had a formative influence on French high culture. The Paris Salon was originally an officially-sanctioned exhibition of recent works by members of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, starting in 1673 and soon moving from the Salon Carré of the Palace of the Louvre.
The name remained, even when other quarters were found and the exhibitions' irregular intervals became biennial. A jury system of selection was introduced in 1748.
In the 19th century this other idea of Salon was extended to an annual government-sponsored juried exhibition of new painting and sculpture, held by invitation in large commercial halls, to which the ticket-bearing public was invited. The vernissage ("varnishing") of opening night was a grand social occasion, and a crush that gave subjects for newspaper caricaturists like Honoré Daumier. Charles Baudelaire and others wrote reviews of the annual salons, whose officially sanctioned art, increasingly conservative and "academic", refused entry to the Impressionists who organized their own counter-salon, the Salon des Refusés opening May 17, 1863, a date that marks the official birth of the Avant garde. Later "Refusés" salons were held in 1874, 1875 and 1886. In 1881 the government withdrew official sponsorship from the annual Salon, and a group of artists organised the Société des artistes français to take responsibility for the show.
In 1903, the Salon d'Automne was founded.
External links: private salons
External links: juried exhibitions
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