By order of Napoleon III, works rejected by the 1863 Paris Salon jury were shown in a parallel exhibition so the public could judge for itself. Crowds came to laugh, above all at Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe and Whistler's White Girl, but the show broke the Salon's monopoly on what counted as art.
The first institutional crack in the academic system: from here the path runs straight to the independent exhibitions of the Impressionists.
Artists involved
