Salon of 1849

The Salon of 1849 was an art exhibition held in Paris. It was the first to be located at the Tuileries Palace, rather than the traditional venue of the Salon at the Louvre.^[1] It was staged during the French Republic which had been established following the Revolution of 1848. The Tuileries were a historic royal residence, and had before the revolution belonged to the now deposed Louis Philippe I.

The rules of submission were made more open to artists. A major beneficiary of this was the realist painter Gustave Courbet whose After Dinner at Ornans won a gold medal. Under the July Monarchy Salon juries had rejected all but three of his twenty two submissions.^[2] The young Pierre-Charles Comte exhibited a history painting The Coronation of Inês de Castro in 1361 featuring the fourteenth century Portuguese queen Inês de Castro.^[3] Rosa Bonheur displayed a rural scene Ploughing in the Nivernais.^[4] Another realist painter François Bonvin submitted three paintings.^[5]

The landscape artist Théodore Rousseau submitted his first work since one of his entries had been refused at the Salon of 1836.^[6] Adolphe Pierre Leleux produced a work featuring stonebreakers, a year before Courbet's more famous The Stone Breakers.^[7] In sculpture James Pradier exhibited the Neoclassical statue Chloris Caressed by Zephyrus. The romantic painter Eugène Delacroix exhibited four paintings. These included a second version of his Women of Algiers in their Apartment along with Othello and Desdemona along with two neo-Baroque still lifes Basket of Flowers and Basket of Flowers and Fruit.^[8]