range of works of art. It held seven exhibitions between 1751 and 1774, at various venues and on
different dates, in years when formal Salon exhibitions were not being held by the Académie royale. Its
exhibits consisted mainly of genre paintings, portraits, pastels, gem engravings and drawings. It struggled
financially until its abolition in 1776 and for the following five years artists in Paris who were not
members of the Académie royale had few venues for the display of their work. The exhibitions at Saint
Luc were taken seriously outside the confines of the Académie royale, which disliked the institution’s
commercialism. They generated exhibition catalogues and some serious critical reviews. Although many
of the latter were condescending, a review of the 1774 exhibition (in the Mercure of October that year)
praised some of the portrait busts on display as well as works in a higher genre including Élisabeth Vigée
Le Brun’s allegorical representations of Painting, Poetry and Music (Berger, 1999, 229–232).
There had been some limited access to royal collections in France from the seventeenth century. The
crown owned hundreds of old master works, including some by Raphael, Van Dyck, Poussin, Le Brun and
Rubens (Berger, 1999, 85–87). Following an appeal in 1747 (in La Font de Saint Yenne’s Reflexions) for
wider public access, the Director of Public Buildings, Lenormand de Tournehem, put the royal collection
at the Luxembourg Palace on public display. Mentioned in several eighteenthcentury guidebooks, the
collection included Rubens’ Marie de’ Medici cycle (1622–1625). There was also a room dedicated
exclusively to French art, which encouraged critical thinking on the national school of art. Following a
royal decree the gallery was opened in 1750 for roughly two days per week to the wider public, then
closed to them in 1779, when the building in which it was housed passed into the possession of the
younger brother of Louis XVI (reigned 1774–1793), the Comte de Provence. At this time the bulk of the
royal collection remained at Versailles, where it was mainly exclusive to the court and its visiting
diplomats (Berger, 1999, 210–219). Today the collection at the Luxembourg Palace has been dispersed
across several museums. In 1776 another Director of Public Buildings, d’Angiviller, had begun work on
boosting the royal collection (and thus the reputation of the monarch) and preparing it for public
exhibition at the Louvre, but his efforts were interrupted by the Revolution. Collections such as those built
by the Duc d’Orléans (Philippe II, Regent of France 1674–1723), the Duc de Choiseul (1719–1785) and
Jean de Jullienne provided opportunities for “polite” visitors and artists to view art prior to the
Revolution.
There were several preRevolutionary attempts in Paris to achieve a fuller public engagement with art,
but with varying success. Following the demise of the Académie de Saint Luc and its exhibitions, an
exhibition at the Colisée was organized in Paris. A site of popular entertainment, this building brought
together members from a wide range of classes, and the 1776 exhibition included curios, luxury objects
and paintings by foreign (especially German) artists. Many former members of the Académie de St Luc
exhibited there. The exhibition was seen as a threat to the exclusivity of the Académie royale and not
permitted the following year (Wrigley, 1993, 33–36). The same official distrust greeted the launch in
1778 of the Salon de la Correspondance established by Mammès ClaudeCatherine PahinChamplain
de la Blancherie (1752–1811) in order to bring together for the purposes of exhibitions and discussions
artists, scientists and amateurs excluded from the Académie royale. This ran intermittently until 1787
when all salons and clubs were shut down in response to fears of political activism. Pahin de la
Blancherie also organized in 1793 an exhibition dedicated to a survey of the French School, which served
to intensify interest in national culture.
It is clear that a number of artists who had previously exhibited at the Académie royale, Académie de St
Luc, Place Dauphine, Colisée and other sites were seeking by the late 1780s alternative exhibition
opportunities and, in fact, the Académie itself was forced in 1791, after the onset of the Revolution and
under pressure from its own artists, to run an “open” exhibition that welcomed a wider range of artists
and downplayed genre hierarchies. “Exclusivity” was increasingly under threat. After the Revolution,