Explore "Paul Gauguin" by John Gould Fletcher on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
In 1889 there opened in Paris on the Champ-de-Mars the Universal Exposition, to celebrate the centennial of the taking of the Bastile. Of this exhibition and of the palace built to house it, nothing now remains except the melancholy Eiffel Tower.
The pictures admitted to the exhibition were, rather naturally, of a kind sanctioned by academic officialdom. Wherefore visitors who happened to patronize the Cafe Volpini near the entrance were doubtless startled to find upon the walls a hundred pictures of a kind calculated to shock all their susceptibilities in art matters. Their perplexity cannot have been greatly lessened by the receipt of a catalogue bearing this title: "Catalogue of the Exposition of Pictures of the Impressionist and Syntheticist Group, held on the Premises of M. Volpini, at the Champ-de-Mars, 1889."