Art in the Second Empire

 THE 1855 UNIVERSAL EXPOSITION marked both the end of one era and  the beginning of another. Until  the Second  Republic, the  world of art still clung  to centuries-old tradition:  artists of major  importance, such  as  Ingres and  Delacroix, were usually  recognized  by the Government and  produced, on commission, large-scale history paintings for public consumption. Contemporary taste  was  defined   by  the  Academy and   by cultivated amateurs who played  quasi-governmental roles in assuring that  the King  or Emperor had, or at least seemed  to have, suitably elevated aesthetic judgment.  By the end  of the Second   Empire, the modern art  world  had  emerged. Henceforth, neither Church nor  State, neither aristocracy nor Academy would be able  to set  the  rules:  a new power, the bourgeoisie, had emerged, demanding recognition of its own taste. And although modern scholars might  dispute the def1nition  of the  bourgeoisie, nineteenth­ century  art   critics  knew   exactly whom   they   meant -- the  untitled but  well-to-do members of the manufacturing and  commercial classes who bought pictures for investment  and  decoration and  preferred the lower  genres  of art.  If culture can  be said  to follow economics, then  one might  consider the Revolution of 1789,  with  its economic shift  of power  from  the aristocracy to the  bourgeoisie, as leading inexorably, almost a century later. to  the aesthetic shift described  here.

The major art  event  of the  1850s  was the  Universal Exposition of 1855, as much  a political  as  a  cultural event.   This study, then,   should   begin  with   a survey  of  the political  protagonists in  the  French art  world  of the  1800s, for  it was  they,  and  not artists who  set  official  standards of taste.