A Glut in Search of a Market

Harrison C. White and Cynthia A. White, Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp.83-84, 88-89.

At least 200,000 reputable canvases must have been produced in each decade after  midcentury by professional

French painters. This is the single dominant fact in our account, an index of the problems confronting the Academic system. Our minimum estimates derived earlier are (around 1863) 3000 recognized male painters in the Parisian system and another 1000 men in provincial orbits. We omit consideration of women  painters, occasional painters, and professional artists in other fields who did  some painting.  Major painters, we know from detailed oeuvre catalogues, often turned out fifty or more salable oil  paintings in a year. More often than not,  the typical painter entered two or three pictures in a given Salon, and these were usually but a selection of his most promising works  on  hand.

The days of "les  grandes machines,'  the enormous neoclassical painting or the panoramic battle scene, were numbered. As early as 1837 the reviewer for Le Moniteur Universel noted their  scarcity, commenting that there was no longer room to hang them. This was an  element: a painter had a better chance of being accepted with small pictures which were not such a problem to display. The greatest influence, however, was the demand for small genre painting and  landscape, an increasing trend with   buyers.  A painter finished many of these in the year it would have taken him to complete  one  large  work.

CANVASES VS CAREERS

Four thousand is not  a staggering number of  professionals to encompass in a decentralized institutional system. But in this  case 3000 men were in one lump, in the core  of the Academic institutional system centered on Paris, and few leaders of this system recognized a responsibility to organize and support such a large group. The other major difficulty was that the  focus of the Academic system was not men,  not a set of careers, but rather the river  of canvases. By the system's own  definition, moreover, each canvas led  an independent existence as a separate entity with  its own  reputation and  history. Yet the  system never developed, within its own confines,  the capacity to place this hoard of unique objects for pay. Not  all paintings had to be placed, of course, nor were they placed by the alternative system of dealers and critics that was evolving. But enough of them had to be placed to give the artist some semblance of the regular income necessitated by his own middle-class view of himself. It was a view derived, in many cases, from his own family background and enforced by the official ideology of the Academic system, an ideology of the respectability of  the artist as a learned professional.

It was the picture, not  the  artist, around which  the official ideology centered. A certain static  grandeur was associated with each individual work. The figure of the artist had  an analogous static quality. The Academic aim had  been to place him in the empyrean, a grand figure of learning.

It is exceedingly difficult to evaluate and process a large number of objects, using a single centralized organization, when  the objects are defined as being unique. Fatigue bore upon the jury of the single yearly Salon, as they stumbled, almost unseeing, amid the thousands of paintings submitted. At these times, reality compelled attention to artists as individuals in a social context; thus  for some of the jury log-rolling of the crassest kind dominated their  deliberations, rather than concern with the type and quality of  each painting.