 In an era before formal museums existed, the public had little access to art, until the Royal Academy began displaying paintings in what is known as the Salon in 1737. The Salon began as a political and social event that was inaugurated in the Louvre’s Salon Carré on 25 August—St. Louis’ day—to pay homage to the king and it was to last one month. Over the years, it became a valuable guide for tracing the major trends in style and aesthetic ideas, for lists of works as well as evolutionary trends in pictorial genres were taken into account. But the most significant consequence of the rise of the Salon was the birth of a new literary genre, namely, the salon review, which flourished until the twentieth century and has been an incomparable mirror of aesthetic thought. Originally, such reviews were just a blend of descriptive reports and theoretical asides, often controversial. The “salon” is for the benefit of a larger public—that is, those not necessarily affiliated with some artistic institution. As La Font de Saint-Yenne wrote in 1747: 