David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

deliberations and waited outside, hoping
to find out early whether he got in or not.
But then becoming shy, he introduced
himself as a friend of Renoir’s. Another
of the Guerbois regulars, Frédéric
Bazille, once confessed, “I have an
appalling fear of getting rejected.” When
the artist Jules Holtzapffel didn’t make it
into the Salon of 1866, he shot himself in
the head. “The members of the jury have
rejected me. Therefore I have no talent,”
read his suicide note. “I must die.” For a
painter in nineteenth-century France, the
Salon was everything, and the reason
that the Salon was such an issue for the
group of Impressionists was that time
and again, the Salon jury turned them
down.