A Session of the Painting Jury

By the early 1880s the French State had stepped back from running the Paris Salon. The artists themselves, organised as the Société des Artistes Français, now elected the jury that decided which pictures got in. Gervex painted one of those sessions, probably the jury of 1883, in a room of the Palais de l'Industrie on the Champs-Élysées, and showed the result at the Salon of 1885. It is a group portrait of 31 identifiable jurors, among them Bouguereau, Cabanel, Carolus-Duran and Puvis de Chavannes, and Gervex put himself in the crowd as well. Look at the umbrellas and walking canes raised above the top hats. That was how the jurors voted. Attendants in white smocks handle the heavy gilt frames. The lawyer and politician Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau, later prime minister, gave the painting to the State in 1892.