Fin de Siècle: Academic Art, Art Nouveau, and Global Influence

Throughout the nineteenth century, official taste in France was shaped by the Salon, an annual juried exhibition controlled by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which favored polished, highly finished academic painting on historical, mythological, or religious subjects. Painters such as William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Alexandre Cabanel achieved enormous success and official honors within this system, which held enough authority that its 1863 rejection of large numbers of submissions forced Napoleon III to establish the alternative Salon des Refusés, an event that gave Manet and other independent-minded painters their first major public exposure and marked an early crack in the Salon's control over what counted as legitimate art.