From Raymond  Rudorff,  Belle Epoque -- The Artistic Revolution, Part 1

Rudorff presents a general -- and generally quite negative -- view of the official artistic world of Paris in the late 19th century. As you read it, think about the roles that art played in French society and the ways that those roles helped shape what options were available to French artists.

 

The kind  of painting, sculpture, furniture, interior decoration and  architecture in favour with  most Parisians who could afford them was distinguished by academic traditionalism,  a nostalgia for  past  styles  and  a total   lack  of imagination. In the paintings which the  prosperous bourgeois admired in exhibitions or  hung on  his walls, the  emphasis was on  a nearly photographic realism and  on subject matter. A painting had  to be “well done” and  the subject  represented  had   to  be  "picturesque'',  "dramatic" or “moving". Most of the paintings produced were narrative scenes, historical  or  military, sentimentally contrived incidents from everyday  life,  portraits  or  illustrations  of  Greek   and   Roman legends, the last  being  good pretexts for  representations of the nude. Such   paintings were  no  different in style  and  spirit  from those  that  could be seen  in homes and  art galleries  and  in thou­ sands   of  engraved reproductions  in  Berlin,   Vienna,  Brussels, Rome or  London. Where  Paris  differed  from other capitals was in its attraction for art  students from all over  the  world-lured to  the  city by its Bohemia and   uninhibited student life-and  in the exceptional degree of official  respect  paid to the most popular artists.

The last  three decades of  the  19th century in  Paris  saw  the apotheosis of the great  masters of what is now known as "official'', "Salon" or "academic" art. The art   they  produced faithfully reflected the standards, tastes  and  ideals  that  prevailed among France's middle and upper classes, and  in return for  their paintings  they were lionised in society and  honoured by the  state.

The works of most  of these  painters have  long  been  forgotten or if they are occasionally resurrected it is because of their curiosity  value,  their  "quaintness" or  because  of the  light  they  throw on  the  social  history of the  time. But  the  life and  civilisation of the  late  19th  century cannot be fully  appreciated if we ignore them because  such  works were more typically representative of the  society that produced them than those  of the  revolutionary artists. The chers maltres [“dear masters”]of the  Belle  Epoque [“Beautiful Epoch” – the term used by the French in the 20th century to idealize the decades just before the outbreak of World War I in 1914] are as much part  of the background of 1890's life in Paris as the  horse  carriage, the Second Empire-style architecture of the boulevards,  the   bustles and frills of elegant ladies and  the general air of comfortable opulence that older generations have recalled with  much nostalgia.