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Browse the storeThe Salon des Refuses of 1863 exhibited works rejected by the Paris Salon jury. Manet, Whistler, and Cezanne showed there. Learn how it launched modern art.
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On May 15, 1863, a second exhibition opened in the Palais de l'Industrie in Paris, alongside the official Paris Salon. It contained 2,217 works that the Salon jury had rejected. More than a thousand visitors per day pushed through the crowded galleries, laughing, staring, and arguing. The journalist Emile Zola reported that the rooms were full of the laughter of spectators. The most talked-about painting in the exhibition was Edouard Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe, a canvas showing a nude woman picnicking with two clothed men in a wooded glade. The public called it obscene. Emperor Napoleon III, who had authorized the exhibition, reportedly stared at it and walked away in disgust. The painting is now in the Musee d'Orsay and is considered one of the founding works of modern art.
The Salon des Refuses was an exhibition of artworks rejected by the jury of the official Paris Salon. The term is most famously used for the 1863 exhibition, which was authorized by Napoleon III after the Salon jury rejected two-thirds of the submitted paintings and the rejected artists protested. The Salon des Refuses gave the public a chance to see what the jury had excluded, and it turned rejection into a public event. The exhibition legitimized artists who were pushing beyond academic conventions and became a turning point in the history of modern art.
This entry covers what the Salon des Refuses was, why it happened, who exhibited there, what the public and critics made of the rejected works, and how the exhibition changed the relationship between artists and the institutions that judged them.
The Salon des Refuses, French for "exhibition of rejects," was an exhibition of works that the jury of the official Paris Salon had rejected. The term is most closely associated with the 1863 exhibition, though subsequent Salons des Refuses were mounted in Paris in 1874, 1875, and 1886. The 1863 exhibition is the one that matters, because it was the first time the French state formally acknowledged that the jury system was producing legitimate grievances among artists.
The Salon des Refuses was not an act of generosity by the state. It was a political response to protest. In 1863, the Salon jury rejected approximately 2,800 of the 5,000 paintings submitted. The rejected artists included Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Antoine Chintreuil, Johan Jongkind, and James McNeill Whistler. The rejection rate was unusually high, and the rejected artists and their supporters organized protests that reached Emperor Napoleon III. Napoleon III's office issued a statement: "Numerous complaints have come to the Emperor on the subject of the works of art which were refused by the jury of the Exposition. His Majesty, wishing to let the public judge the legitimacy of these complaints, has decided that the works of art which were refused should be displayed in another part of the Palace of Industry."
Napoleon III was not a champion of artistic innovation. His personal taste ran to academic painters like Alexandre Cabanel and Franz Xaver Winterhalter. But he was sensitive to public opinion, and the protests had become politically embarrassing. The Salon des Refuses was a compromise: let the public decide whether the jury was right.
The 1863 Salon des Refuses opened on May 15 in the Palais de l'Industrie, the same building that housed the official Salon. The exhibition contained 2,217 works: paintings, sculptures, engravings, lithographs, and architectural drawings. The works were hung in crowded galleries, packed cheek by jowl on three walls. A rare photographic souvenir of the exhibition, a carte-de-visite showing a caricature drawing of one of the galleries, survives in the collection of the Bibliotheques specialisees de la Ville de Paris. The image shows a large gallery filled with paintings and a fashionable crowd, with Manet's three submitted paintings visible high on the far wall. Read more about this artifact at Bibliotheques specialisees de Paris.
The two most debated paintings in the exhibition were Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe and Whistler's Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl. Manet's painting shows a nude woman seated in a rural setting with two fully dressed men, with a second woman bathing in the background. The painting was perceived as scandalous because the nude figure was not a mythological goddess but a recognizably modern woman, and her direct gaze at the viewer read as defiance rather than modesty. The model was Victorine Meurent, a painter in her own right. The public and critics mocked the painting, but it drew more attention than anything in the official Salon.
Whistler's The White Girl had been rejected by both the Royal Academy in London and the Paris Salon jury before reaching the Salon des Refuses. The painting shows a woman in a white dress standing against a white background, an exercise in tonal harmony rather than narrative. Whistler's supporters argued that the painting was "an apparition with a spiritual content," and that its subject was the arrangement of color, not a literal depiction. The painting was seen as connected to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but Whistler's thesis that art is about color relationships, not storytelling, pointed toward modernism.
The public response to the Salon des Refuses was largely hostile, but the hostility itself was productive. More than a thousand visitors per day came to see the rejected works, and the press coverage was extensive. Critics ridiculed the paintings, but the ridicule gave the artists visibility that they would not have received if the jury had simply rejected them in silence. The Salon des Refuses turned rejection into a public spectacle, and the spectacle drew attention to the gap between what the academic jury considered acceptable and what the emerging avant-garde was producing.
Not all critics were hostile. Emile Zola defended Manet, arguing that Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe was no more scandalous than many works hanging in the Louvre. Zola became one of Manet's most vocal supporters and used the Salon des Refuses as evidence that the jury system was corrupt and outdated. The painter Gustave Courbet, who had himself been rejected in 1863, also spoke out against the jury.
In June 2025, the Musee d'Orsay held a theatrical mock trial in its auditorium, putting Manet and his model Victorine Meurent on trial for obscenity. Students from a debate club made their cases in character before a sitting judge, with the help of three lawyers. The student portraying Meurent "asserted her right to nudity and, more broadly, to women's emancipation," while students playing Zola and Courbet spoke out against artistic censorship. The judge ruled that the offense of public outrage had been proved but instructed Manet to continue painting. The event was part of the Orsay Live program aimed at 18- to 25-year-olds. Read the report at Smithsonian Magazine.
Manet submitted three paintings to the 1863 Salon jury: Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe, Young Man in the Costume of a Majo (1863), and Mademoiselle V... in the Costume of an Espada (1862). All three were rejected. Manet chose to exhibit them in the Salon des Refuses, where Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe became the most controversial painting in Paris. The painting was inspired by Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving after Raphael's The Judgment of Paris and by Titian's Pastoral Concert (c. 1509), but Manet translated those classical sources into a modern Parisian setting. The scandal made Manet the most discussed artist in France, and the painting's notoriety helped establish him as the figure who bridged Realism and Impressionism.
Whistler's Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (1862) was rejected by the Royal Academy in London and then by the Paris Salon jury. At the Salon des Refuses, it drew attention for its rejection of narrative in favor of tonal harmony. Whistler argued that the painting was about the arrangement of whites, not about a specific subject. This position, that art is about formal relationships rather than storytelling, became a foundational principle of modernism.
Pissarro was rejected by the 1863 Salon jury and exhibited at the Salon des Refuses. He would go on to be the only artist who participated in all eight Impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886. His presence at the Salon des Refuses places him among the artists whose rejection by the Salon system pushed them toward independent exhibition.
Cezanne exhibited at the Salon des Refuses in 1863, though his work drew little attention at the time. He would continue to submit to the Salon throughout the 1860s and 1870s and was consistently rejected. Cezanne's later work, which bridged Impressionism and Cubism, would become one of the most influential bodies of painting in art history. His early rejection by the Salon is a reminder that the jury's judgment was not always a reliable measure of artistic quality.
The 1863 Salon des Refuses was a one-time event, but its consequences were permanent. It exposed the contradictions of the jury system and gave artists a precedent for organizing outside the official Salon. The Impressionists cited the Salon des Refuses as evidence that the Salon could not be reformed from within. When they organized their first independent exhibition in 1874, they were following the logic that the Salon des Refuses had established: if the official system rejects you, create your own venue.
Subsequent Salons des Refuses were held in 1874, 1875, and 1886, but none had the impact of the 1863 exhibition. By 1886, the year of the last Impressionist exhibition, the Salon's cultural authority had been so diminished that the Salon des Refuses was no longer necessary. Artists had dealers, independent exhibitions, and a growing audience for work that the Salon would not accept.
The term "Salon des Refuses" has entered the cultural vocabulary as a shorthand for any exhibition of rejected work. In contemporary art, the concept remains relevant: the question of who gets to decide what is shown, and what happens to the work that is excluded, is still active. Curators, juries, and selection committees play the same gatekeeping role that the Salon jury played in the 19th century, and artists who are excluded still face the same choice between accepting the judgment and finding another venue.
The Salon des Refuses is inseparable from the history of the Paris Salon and the academy that controlled it. It is the moment when the avant-garde began to define itself in opposition to official institutions. Impressionism was the first movement to emerge from artists who had been rejected by the Salon. Realism, associated with Courbet, was the movement that preceded the 1863 crisis and set the terms of the conflict. For more on how rejection shaped modern art, read our post on Impressionism and breaking academic rules or our guide to art censorship through history.
Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe is in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, where it hangs alongside Olympia (1863), which was accepted by the 1865 Salon but provoked an even greater scandal. Whistler's Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Seeing these paintings in person makes clear why they provoked such reactions. The Manet is large, confrontational, and painted with a flatness that rejects the modeling techniques the academy taught. The Whistler is subtle and tonal, a painting about color rather than subject.
The Salon des Refuses lasted for a few months in 1863, but it changed the course of art history. It proved that rejection by an official institution could be more valuable than acceptance, and that the public could be trusted to see what the jury could not. For more on what came after, read our entries on Impressionism and the avant-garde, or explore our post on the evolution of art styles.
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