New York's favorite pictures in the 1870s.

By 1870 American art, swamped by an aesthetic tidal wave from Paris, had surrendered its position as the dominant commodity in the New York City art market. An Atlantic crossing was no longer required to become familiar with contemporary European art. Since 1848 the leading French publisher of fine art reproductions, the Maison Goupil, (1) had been selling a multitude of engravings, lithographs, and (since 1853) photographs from premises at the very hub of the art trade in the United States. (2)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In a woodcut in Harper's Weekly on May 14, 1870 (PI. II), a genteel crowd takes in an exhibition of paintings at an "afternoon lounge" at "Goupil's Art Gallery" (actually, Goupil and Company, M. Knoedler, Successor). Not visible is the first floor of the premises at 170 Fifth Avenue--"the store," as the Knoedler family always called it--where Goupil's prints were sold (PI. V). These reproductions were as much, if not more, a part of the business at Goupil's as the paintings.

Reproductive prints and photographs were the primary mediums for the international dissemination of art and artists' reputations in the nineteenth century. Emile Zola (1840-1902) acknowledged this in 1867, when, decrying the commercialism of that perennial Salon favorite Jean Leon Gerome, he claimed that the artist (the son-in-law of Adolphe Goupil, the cofounder of the Maison Goupil)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]