Abstract EN:

We have tried to situate the birth of the bordeaux salon within the local environment, to insert it in the wider trend of the "friends of arts" societies in france,and to give an account of its first attempts,rich in lessons though unsuccessful,during the french restoration. After those preliminaries, we investigated the administrative and institutional features of the salon, trying to grasp the individual characteristies of the organizers,collectors and buyers,in order to make out the common thought and habits of "friends of arts". Exhibitions,subscriptions lotteries were the bases upon which the organization of the society relied. Looking as though it copied the system of the paris salon,it could nervertheless assert its originality. Twenty seven thousand three hundred and ninety five artists exhibited more than forty nine thousand works in bordeaux. Turning over the pages of that large catalogue which offers thousands of names,mostly of unrecognised and forgotten artists,that huge handbook concerning more than a century,we can rediscover the genuine tastes of the period. There can be found the "true" painting of the nineteenth century,without any rectifying,almost exhaustive in its diversity and contradictions.