Camille-Léopold Cabaillot-Lassalle

Camille-Léopold Cabaillot-Lassalle trained in his father's studio and built a steady career at the Paris Salon, the huge annual state exhibition, with refined scenes of Parisian women close to the manner of James Tissot and Alfred Stevens, two fashionable painters of modern life.

His best-known canvas pictures that exhibition itself. The Salon of 1874 shows visitors in a crowded gallery, an elderly woman reading the catalogue and men studying pictures hung close together. It went on show when the Salon opened on 1 May 1874, so he painted the scene before it existed. The small pictures on his painted wall are real works from that year's Salon, and the catalogue noted that each miniature had been painted by the author of the original, among them the landscape painter Camille Corot. The Musée d'Orsay received the canvas in 2023 as a gift from two art galleries.