Salon of 1769

The Salon of 1769 was an art exhibition held at the Louvre in Paris. Opening on 25 August 1769 it took place in the Salon Carré, the traditional location for the biannual Salon. It featured submissions from leading painters, sculptors and architects during the reign of Louis XV.

Amongst the paintings on display was The Lady with the Veil by Alexander Roslin featuring his wife Marie-Suzanne Giroust. She is shown Bolognese costume, her face partially obscured. Jean-Baptiste Greuze exhibited the neoclassical history painting Septimius Severus and Caracalla^[1] as well as a portrait of his fellow painter Étienne Jeaurat.^[2] Despite his desire to be taken seriously as a painter of history he was treated as a genre painter by the Salon.^[3] The portraitist Joseph Duplessis made his breakthrough, submitting a number of works including a picture of Madame Lenoir.^[4]

Joseph Vernet displayed the expressive Port of Palermo by Moonlight. The critic Denis Diderot identified works by Vernet and a fellow landscape painter Hubert Robert as reflecting the category of the "Sublime".^[5] It was the last Salon featuring François Boucher, the Premier peintre du Roi and one of the standard bearers of the rococo style.^[6] Over the coming decade, rococo would fall dramatically out of fashion as it was supplanted by the now dominant Neoclassicism.