Many famous paintings are French because of the Salon. For almost two centuries, this official Paris show could make a painter's name. It was named for the Louvre room where it met from 1725. In 1874, about 450,000 people came.
A jury picked the works. A picture could win a medal, sell to the state or get savaged in the papers. Below, I tell what each did to Paris: the rule it broke, the crowd it angered, the rule it set.
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How These Were Chosen
I started with fame: names people still search for. No painter appears twice. Each answers yes to one of three questions. Did Paris push back when it was new? Did it drop something its first viewers expected?
Did it stand for one side in a painters' quarrel over what painting should be? Several never hung at the Salon. A few caused no recorded stir.
12. Paul Cézanne, The Card Players (about 1890 to 1892)
Three men sit around a small table, their cards in hand. A fourth man stands behind them with a pipe in his mouth.
Four more pipes hang on the wall at their backs. Paul Cézanne set the scene in Provence and worked on it in about 1890 to 1892.
His models were laborers from the Jas de Bouffan, the estate outside Aix-en-Provence that he had inherited from his father. He paid them five francs a sitting.
Card games already had a long career in painting, from Caravaggio to Chardin. Cézanne had almost certainly seen a seventeenth-century Card Players in the museum of Aix, his hometown.
Its label named the Le Nain brothers, three painters of that century. In scenes of this kind the players often cheat, so the whole story travels through sly glances and gestures.
Cézanne kept the table and the cards, but he threw out the plot. His three players keep their eyes on their own hands.
Nobody signals to a partner, and nobody gives anything away. For a public raised on tavern scenes, there was simply no story left to follow.
That stillness took real effort. For the exhibition held in London and New York in 2010 and 2011, conservators examined the canvas with X-rays and infrared light.
The X-ray shows halos around the figures, traces of the many adjustments Cézanne made to their poses. One problem he never settled.
The player on the right has no second hand, a gap already left open in the drawings.
It tells me Cézanne cared more about how the three bodies lock around the table than about finishing a gesture.
The Salon never saw this picture. It went from the studio straight to the dealers, with no jury to judge it.
Its first public showing came in November 1899, at the Paris gallery of Ambroise Vollard. Three months later Vollard sold it to Josse and Gaston Bernheim-Jeune, two brothers in the same trade.
At a Glance
Artist: Paul Cézanne (1839 to 1906)
Painted: About 1890 to 1892
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 65.4 × 81.9 cm (25.8 × 32.3 in)
Where to see it: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (the version with three players and a standing man)
About This Painting
Why is The Card Players painting so expensive?
The record price belongs to a different version of The Card Players, with only two players. In 2011 the heirs of George Embiricos, a Greek shipping magnate, sold it privately to Qatar. News reports in February 2012 put the price above $250 million, a figure never officially confirmed.
How many Card Players did Cézanne paint?
Cézanne painted five Card Players canvases. Two show a larger group: the Met picture and a much bigger variant at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, about 135 by 182 centimeters. Three pare the scene down to a pair of players, at the Musée d'Orsay, the Courtauld Gallery and a private collection.
When was The Card Players painted?
None of Cézanne's five Card Players canvases carries a firm date. Recent technical study concluded that the multi-figure canvases came first. The versions with two men followed.
11. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge (1892 to 1895)
A woman's face pushes in from the right-hand edge, lit a harsh acid green. Behind her, a group of men in hats and women with piled-up hair crowd around a table.
Farther back, a dancer fixes her hair in a mirror. The painter is Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
His work on the canvas ran from 1892 to 1895. The room belongs to the Moulin Rouge, the Montmartre nightclub that had opened in 1889.