ABSTRACT
On 21 April 1857, an exhibition opened at the Ecole imperiale et speciale des Beaux-Arts in Paris the like of which had never been seen before in France. Precedents for monographic retrospectives were rare: in 1783, Pahin de la Blanche-rie had held an exhibition of paintings by Joseph Vernet in his Salon de la Correspondance, and in 1822, Horace Vernet had organised his own exhibition of forty-five paintings in his studio. But in 1857, no posthumous retrospective had yet taken place on French soil, although the genre had developed abroad, notably in England and the United States. The exhibition, like its catalogue, adopted a chronological approach, assimilating the work with the temporality of the artist's life following a biographical model. In fact, Paul Delaroche's posthumous retrospective offered a completely new interpretation of his work and the unprecedented opportunity to analyse an artist's career in its entirety through a direct encounter with all his works.
