ANTOINE WATTEAU'S Shopsign of the art dealer Edmé-François Gersaint (L’Enseigne de Gersaint; Fig.1) is probably the best-known French painting of the early eighteenth century, and universally considered the artist’s masterpiece. Its fame, however, does not go back to the time of its creation but originates either with a remark made by Edmond de Goncourt in 1875 (who had never seen the painting) or, more plausibly, with an exhibition of masterworks from Berlin private collections held in 1883 at the Berlin Königliche Akademie der Künste. It was only after that date that the Shopsign gained the fame that it has retained ever since.

BEFORE THE ROCOCO was embraced by wealthy nineteenth-century collectors such as Richard Wallace, the Rothschilds and the Goncourt brothers – thereby validating the taste for a wider public – François Hippolyte Walferdin (1795–1880) was able to amass, with limited financial means, almost four hundred sheets and around one hundred paintings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. This collection was celebrated in its day, and no museum or private collection since has rivalled Walferdin’s holdings of the artist. Spanning all periods of Fragonard’s career, but with a special emphasis on the works of his maturity and late years, Walferdin’s collection was dispersed at auction after his death and, while the accompanying catalogue detailed the lots, most were not illustrated. Among them were two unillustrated sheets, both listed simply as ‘un pêcheur, sanguine’. Baron Roger Portalis, who published a lengthy article on Walferdin’s Fragonards at the time of the sale, included the fishermen in his discussion of the most important and beautiful sheets in the collection, describing them as drawn from life. They were listed again in Portalis’s 1889 catalogue raisonné, where he noted that they had been purchased at the Walferdin sale by Baron Hottinguer, but by the twentieth century the drawings had been lost from view and were rarely mentioned in the literature. In fact, Fragonard’s pêcheurs remained in the possession of the Hottinguer family from 1880 until 2006, when they were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Figs.12 and 13).

EDOUARD MANET WAS related by marriage to Ambroise Adam and also his good friend, painting a plein-air portrait sketch of him in 1861 (Fig.18). Among the pictures, papers, prints, drawings and photographs that belonged to Adam and his son-in-law, the artist Léon Gauthier, is an exceptionally rare, perhaps unique, ‘souvenir’ of the celebrated Salon des Refusés of 1863. The carte-photographe shows a large gallery filled with paintings that hang cheek by jowl on three walls (Fig.19). The fashionable crowd in the room includes a variety of social and even ethnic types, and the scene is made more dynamic by the fact that pictures on the absent ‘fourth wall’, where the viewer of the photograph is located, are also the subject of the spectators’ gaze – a very close and possibly prurient one in the case of a ‘Monsieur Prudhomme’ figure enthusiastically adjusting his pince-nez. An oval blindstamp in the lower margin of the card reads photographie de la madeleine / camille rensch / 19, rue royale, 19, and the albumen print reproduces a detailed caricature drawing signed fabritzius. Its subject is unmistakable. High up on the far wall are the three paintings that Manet submitted to the Salon jury in 1863: two full-length ‘Spanish’ figures and his large painting of a bathing party, clearly signed on the caricature with his name in capital letters. When Manet’s three paintings and three etchings were rejected by the jury, he opted to hang them in the ‘Salon annexe’, or ‘contre-exposition’, as it was dubbed by its organising committee.

LIKE THE SALON des Refusés itself, the caricature by Fabritzius (see Fig.19 in Juliet eWilson-Bareau’s article, pp.309–16) may have been meant to function as a post hoc justification of the Salon jury’s decision, with special place reserved for the most egregious examples on display. The only other known caricature of the Refusés appeared in Marcelin’s La Vie parisienne on 11th July 1863 (see Fig.22). In it, an Academician is depicted emerging from a plume of smoke, flaming sword in one hand and a set of scales swinging from the other, astride a scattered collection of those paintings that had attracted attention in contemporary reviews: Edouard Manet’s Le Bain hangs alongside J.M. Whistler’s Dame blanche, Rodolphe Julian’s Le Lever, J.-E. Doneaud’s Jézabel morte and C.-L. Vielcazal’s La Dernière Heure. The Fabritzius differs from this caricature by attempting to stage a version of the exhibition itself, including a mocking throng below the works, but it too relies on these key works to explain the crowd’s reaction.

DECEIT AND VIOLENCE within the confines of a domestic setting lie at the heart of Edgar Degas’s famous Le Viol of 1868–69 (Fig.30), in which the painter presents a disturbing scene of implied sexual aggression. Already in 1908, the art critic and friend of the artist Georges Grappe called the painting a ‘masterpiece among Degas’s masterpieces’, and ever since the painting has provoked much debate. Today it is often considered the most important painting of an interior of the second half of the nineteenth century, notwithstanding the fact that for more than thirty years after its creation it was hardly accessible because Degas exhibited the work for the first time only in June 1905 at the Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris. This article presents new evidence for the interpretation of the scene depicted in Degas’s painting.

IT NOW SEEMS unlikely that a contemporary review of one of the eight Impressionist exhibitions held in Paris between 1874 and 1886 will come to light and fundamentally change our perception of the reception of Impressionism. So large a body of critical material is already available that the emergence of a previously undiscovered text can only perhaps result in some fine-tuning, not a comprehensive re-evaluation. All known critical material to date appeared, of course, in the invaluable volumes compiled by Ruth Berson and published in 1996. Berson herself was quick to acknowledge the probable incompleteness of her massive enterprise and sensibly noted that ‘[a]dditional reviews may well be unearthed’. Given the extraordinary number of ephemeral publications that proliferated in late nineteenth-century France, it would indeed be surprising if there were no omissions from Berson’s tour de force of compilation.What is a little more surprising in the case of an overlooked discussion of the 1879 exhibition in La Revue réaliste (see the Appendix below) is that the periodical itself has received so little attention. Although the Revue réalistewas a short-lived journal, managing just twelve weekly issues between 5th April and 21st June 1879, a restricted lifespan has not always been an impediment to discovery.Jacques Lethève, for example, in his pioneering study of critical reactions to Impressionism and Symbolism, noted both La Décadence (1886) and the Revue fantaisiste (1881), neither of which lasted beyond the year of their creation. A paradigm of the short run might seem to be L’Impressionniste (1877), which lasted for only four issues, although in this instance its very title indicates why it cannot be taken as a test case.