[Photo Credit: Catalogue illustré by Société des artistes français. Salon (Paris: L. Baschet), 1896. Getty Research Institute, 75945.]
The Paris Salon of 1896 included thousands of paintings, which filled every inch of the exhibition rooms’ walls from floor to ceiling. Julia wrote to her cousins Lucy and Pierre LeBrun on 6 July 1896: “We had two days at the Salon des Champs Elysée and . . . I only saw ½ the rooms. The sculptures are more fine and numerous, the paintings on larger scale & more finished.” Many of the latter depicted dramatic and violent scenes, “with a very large number of most horrible subjects – actually one room made me so faint I had to leave –immense finely painted canvases too – You would have had all sorts of gore to your heart’s content.”
[Julia Morgan Papers, Special Collections, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, 2-D-17-10.]
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