Paris Salon Statistics

Today’s blockbuster museum exhibitions are a sideshow compared with the Paris Salon.

Most modern large exhibitions at the Met or the Louvre display between 100 and 150 paintings. The Salon hung as many as 5,318 works (1887), making it about 50 times larger.

If you took all the paintings and lined them up side by side along a highway, frame touching frame, they would stretch for six or eight miles.

The proper term was “The Exhibition of Living Artists.” After 1855 it opened in the Palais des Champs-Elysees, a vast warehouse-like space.

The Salon opened during the first week in May. Admission was one franc, well within the means of working people. As a result, the appreciation for Salon artwork cut across all social classes, as movies do today.

The paintings were grouped by the letter of the artists’ last name, so Manet, Monet, and Meissonier shared a room. Popular paintings were accompanied by guards to keep people from trampling each other.

Paris had a population of around 1.4 million in the later part of the 19th century. Of that number, about a million people visited the exhibition at least once during its six-week run. About 23,000 visitors passed through the doors on average each day.

By comparison, amongst of the best attended shows at the Met were the Leonardo da Vinci and the El Greco exhibitions. Each of those averaged less than 7,000 people per day, a mere third of the Salon’s attendance.
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Adapted from The Judgment of Paris: The Decade that Gave Us Impressionism, By Ross King, link. and The Studios of Paris, by John Milner, link.
Image courtesy Bearded Roman, link.

Lazy Edges

Nicolas Poussin was a great artist, but he suffered from lazy edges.

‘Lazy edges’ is a compositional fault where all the elements in a composition stop short of the edge of the picture. Everything fits into a neat little box in the middle of the design.

Nothing crosses into the outer margins of the picture. The action seems to take place on a theatrical stage or in a shop window. It’s fine if you want a painting to look artificial, but a problem if you want it to look natural.

Artists since the invention of photography have tended to load the edges. Take any photo of real life, follow along its edges, and there’s plenty happening. The photograph above is by Henri Cartier-Bresson.

A good composition should have some important elements near the margin. One of the masterpieces of loaded edges is Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s A Reading from Homer.

1. The reader’s left hand is at the extreme edge. Above the hand is a crucial inscription.

2. The prone figure lies along the bottom edge.

3. The standing figure is tucked into the upper left corner. Part of his face is cropped.

4. You can’t see it in this reproduction, but the very top edge of the painting shows the horizon only about an inch below the edge of the frame in the original painting. Unfortunately all the online versions of this image are compromised by slight cropping.

In a good composition, the slightest cropping destroys the meaning of the picture.

Other artists who use loaded edges effectively: Rembrandt, Edgar Degas, Carl Larsson, Norman Rockwell (1940s and 50s), Edwin Austin Abbey, Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, and Howard Pyle.

Scumbling the Lights

Here’s a painting exercise that really works well with people who are using oils for the first time.

1. Starting with gray-brown chipboard, do a careful pencil drawing of the model about 22 inches high. The model should be lit with a single clear light source.

2. Seal the drawing with shellac. The shellac should be brushed on and squeegeed off with a piece of cardboard.

3. Squeeze some titanium white oil paint onto some blotter paper, or other absorbent paper to remove excess oil.

4. Using a bristle brush, scumble the white paint only in the areas of the form that are touched by light. Make the paint thin for the darker halftones and thicker and whiter for the highlights.

5. Leave the shadows untouched with paint. The result should be a photographic look, with an attention to variations in the light.

This exercise was taught at Art Center College of Design by the instructor Paul Souza. Mr. Souza studied with Millard Sheets and Frederick Taubes and died in 2007 at age 89.

Victorian Painting Exhibition

The Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington is currently hosting a fine collection of 60 Victorian paintings from the Royal Holloway Collection at the University of London. The exhibition will continue through April 12.



The paintings include rural genre, animal painting, marines, landscapes, and historical scenes, like the The Babylonian Marriage Market, 1875, by Edwin Longsden Long (1829-1891). Many of the paintings are driven by storytelling and an awareness of the social conditions of Victorian Britain.



When we visited the exhibit, museum goers were electrified by the narrative aspect of the paintings to the extent that spontaneous conversations sprung up between delighted strangers. The Railway Station by William Powell Frith (1819-1909), above, is so full of as many intriguing subplots as a novel by Dickens. I never appreciated this painting from small reproductions. Bring your kids; they will love the stories.

The April issue of Fine Art Connoisseur has a feature article on the collection written by Tim Barringer.

The exhibit will tour extensively through the USA:
The Yale Center for British Art, May 7 - July 26, 2009.
Brigham Young University Museum of Art, August 15 - October 25, 2009.
Society of the Four Arts, Palm Beach FL, March 12 - April 18, 2010.
Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, Palo Alto, CA, May 19 - July 25, 2010.
Fresno Metropolitan Museum, CA, November 20, 2010- January 30, 2011.
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, February 18 - May 1, 2010.

Charley Parker of the blog "Lines and Colors" also covered the show: link.

The Saint John’s Bible Project

The Saint John’s Bible is the first hand-lettered and hand-illuminated bible commissioned since the invention of the printing press five centuries ago.

The Bible is being written with feather quills on lambskin vellum. The final work, dubbed the “Sistine Chapel of Calligraphy” will require 1100 pages of lambskin.

The project has involved the talents of many artists and calligraphers, spearheaded by by Donald Jackson, working with a team of master calligraphers in a scriptorium in Wales. The illuminations range from decorated capitals to full-page botanical drawings, made with hand-ground inks and gold leaf.

Far from being a revival of historical styles, the design of the book reflects a contemporary and eclectic vision. The project was commissioned about ten years ago, but it is not finished yet. As each section is completed, a full-color printed facsimile becomes available for sale. The last installments, expected in 2010, are the Historical Books and Letters and Revelation.
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Wikipedia article, link.
Official website, link.
Catholic News Service article, link.
Photo courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum, link.

Plein Air People

There’s no rule that you have to paint only landscapes or cityscapes when you’re outdoors with your oil kit. You can paint people, too.

French academic painter Jehan-Georges Vibert executed this 9x14 inch oil study called “At the Corrida” outdoors at a sporting event in 1875. Evidently he painted each figure spontaneously as they struck momentary poses.

Click to enlarge. There's a man leaning over the railing, cheering, and three different women holding up their fans to shield their faces from the sun. Each is a study in character, each sketched from candid subjects.

The piece shows signs of being painted in a slotted box, a typical plein air set-up from the time. The study was probably finished out to the edges later.

See 29 images by Vibert at Art Renewal Center, link.

Botanical Illustration at Denver

I'm at the Denver Botanic Gardens today, doing a workshop on water-soluble colored pencils.

The Denver Botanic Gardens one of America's most extensive botanic gardens. The garden headquarters, which are currently being extensively renovated, also hosts a certificate program for botanical art and illustration.

Students who enroll in the program get a chance to study watercolor, pen-and-ink, scratchboard, colored pencil, and other techniques, as well as botanical science. For more information, visit the page on the DBG site, link., or the Botanical Illustration Blog, link.



The picture above is from Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time. It's painted in oil on illustration board. The pencil drawing was sealed first with acrylic matte medium.