Fameux Jury de Peinture; Salon de 1841

Pruche depicts the members of the Salon jury as having heads constructed of the common objects specified in the accompanying inscription: wig, jawbone, cucumber, jug, jawbone of a horse, crust, pot and melon. In French of the time all these words had familiar secondary meanings that implied the jury members were too old for their positions (perruque), stupid (machoire, concombre, cruche, ganache, melon), or very bad painters (crouton). Pruche signed this print Vertbleu (Green-Blue), a joke on the name of the history painter Horace Vernet and also imitated the signature of that artist, who was a member of the Academy and one of the Salon jurors. The longtime criticism of the jurying process of the annual Salons reached a peak in 1840, when the jury turned down more than half of the 3,996 works submitted that year - a marked rise frmo the previous year, when it had rejected about a third of the entrants. This print, dated 1841, was originally intended for publication in 1840 but was refused by the government on March 17, pending unspecified corrections; a print by Daumier of the same subject seems to have been published in its place. Pruche's print was approved only after a change on May 18 , at which piont the publisher mayhave deemed it better to wait until the following year's Salon to publish it in the satirical journal Le Charivari. (Nadine M. Orenstein, entry in Infinite Jest, exh. cat. 2011-12, cat. 48).