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