David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

among the top ten or twenty colleges in the United States. The University of Maryland finishes much farther back in the pack.
    But let’s think about Caroline’s decision in the same way the Impressionists thought about the Salon. What the Impressionists understood, in their endless debates at the Café Guerbois, was that the choice between the Salon and a solo show wasn’t a simple case of a best option and a second-best option. It was a choice between two very different options, each with its own strengths and drawbacks.
    The Salon was a lot like an Ivy League school. It was the place where reputations were made. And what made it special was how selective it was. There were roughly three thousand painters of “national reputation” in France in the 1860s, and each submitted two or three of his best works to the Salon, which meant the jury was picking from a small mountain of canvases. Rejection was the norm. Getting in was a feat. “The Salon is the real field of battle,” Manet said. “It’s there that one must take one’s measure.” Of all the Impressionists, he was the one most convinced of the value of the Salon. The art critic Théodore Duret, another of the Guerbois circle, agreed. “You have still one step to take,” Duret wrote to Pissarro in 1874. “That is to succeed in becoming known to the public and accepted by all the dealers and art lovers.…I urge you to exhibit; you must succeed in making a noise, in defying and attracting criticism, coming face-to-face with the big public.”
    But the very things that made the Salon so attractive—how selective and prestigious it was—also made it problematic. The Palais was an enormous barn of a building three hundred yards long with a central aisle that was two stories high. A typical Salon might accept three or four thousand paintings, and they were hung in four tiers, starting at ground level and stretching up to the ceiling. Only paintings that met with the unanimous approval of the jury were hung “on the line,” at eye level. If you were “skyed”—that is, hung closest to the ceiling—it was all but impossible for your painting to be seen. (One of Renoir’s paintings was once skyed in the dépotoir. ) No painter could submit more than three works. The crowds were often overwhelming. The Salon was the Big Pond. But it was very hard to be anything at the Salon but a Little Fish.
    Pissarro and Monet disagreed with Manet. They thought it made more sense to be a Big Fish in a Little Pond. If they were off by themselves and held their own show, they said, they wouldn’t be bound by the restrictive rules of the Salon, where Olympia was considered an outrage and where the medals were won by paintings of soldiers and weeping women. They could paint whatever they wanted. And they wouldn’t get lost in the crowd, because there wouldn’t be a crowd. In 1873, Pissarro and Monet proposed that the Impressionists set up a collective called the Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs. There would be no competition, no juries, and no medals. Every artist would be treated as an equal. Everyone but Manet was in.
    The group found space on the Boulevard des Capucines on the top floor of a building that had just been vacated by a photographer. It was a series of small rooms with red-brown walls. The Impressionists’ exhibition opened on April 15, 1874, and lasted one month. The entrance fee was one franc. There were 165 works of art on display, including three Cézannes, ten paintings by Degas, nine Monets, five Pissarros, six Renoirs, and five by Alfred Sisley—a tiny fraction of what was on the walls of the Salon across town. In their show, the Impressionists could exhibit as many canvases as they wished and hang them in a way that allowed people to actually see them. “The Impressionists were lost in the mass of Salon paintings, even when accepted,” the art historians Harrison White and Cynthia White write. “With…the independent group show, they could gain the public’s eye.”
    Thirty-five hundred people attended the show—175 on the first day alone, which was enough to bring the artists critical attention. Not all of that attention was positive: one joke told was that what the Impressionists were doing was loading a pistol with paint and firing at the canvas. But that was the second part of the Big Fish–Little Pond bargain. The Big Fish–Little Pond option might be scorned by some on the outside,