Charles X Distributing Awards to Artists at the Close of the Salon of 1824

On 15 January 1825 Charles X, king for barely four months, came to the Louvre to close the Salon of 1824 and reward the artists who had shown there. Heim was one of them. He received the Legion of Honour that day, and then the royal commission to paint the ceremony itself.

At the centre the king hands the sculptor Pierre Cartellier the Order of Saint Michael, then the highest honour for artists in the grand genres, and the painter Carle Vernet has just received the same. The Louvre identifies 108 people in the crowd, among them the composers Rossini and Cherubini, the painters Ingres, Delaroche and Gérard, and the portraitist Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. The walls are hung frame to frame with pictures from the Salon itself, and Ingres's altarpiece The Vow of Louis XIII can be picked out among them.