The reversed canvas: a topos of conflict between commercial and aesthetic values in nineteenth-century Paris and London

The chapter examines the nineteenth-century background to the exhibitionary freedom celebrated in Henri Rousseau’s Liberty Inviting Artists to Take Part in the 22nd Exhibition of the Socièté des Artistes Indépendants (1905-06). As such, the concern is with the ideological representation of institutional values in paintings of exhibitions and their milieux, and, in particular, the use of the reflexive motif of the reversed canvas to dramatize the conflict between aesthetic and commercial values that arose when professionalized art markets began to wrest cultural authority and financial power away from public institutions in nineteenth-century London and Paris.