Excerpt from Goupil's Paris Salon of 1897: One Hundred Plates, Photogravures and Etchings, and One Water Color Fac-Simile by Goupil and Co

Therefore we owe at least a farewell salute to that Palace, heavy and simple of aspect, but in which so many beautiful productions have been brought together. We owe it, even, much gratitude and many regrets for the hours of refined pleasure it has provided, during our long promenades through the exhibitions that been held here.

We smile at the romantic phrase Walls have eyes and ears. But in one sense of the words, the saying is not so ridiculous as it may seem. Imagination or reality, something clings to walls of all the things that have passed within them. Wandering through the shrunken galleries of this year's Salon, one thinks of those that have preceded it. We shall not recall them, even by a word; that would be re-writing the history of modern painting. It is not without interest, however to skim the catalogue of the Fine Art Exhibition of 1855, birth-date of the Palace which is now to disappear.

A comparison between 1855 and 1897 would not be just. It would be too easy to crush the present with the glories of the past. Of the works of the past, the best only are remembered; the poor and mediocre have died out of memory, many out of existence while the present offers us its productions pell-mell; whole fields of tares with a few good and fruitful wheat-ears towering here and there. And then, it would really be snatching an unfair verdict, to lay the catalogue of 1855, representing the pick of thirty years, against that of 1897, which resumes only one year's labour.

Yet the reading of this catalogue of 1855, which every now and then seems as though it were that of the Louvre, suggests some sufficiently unlooked - for reflections. One lesson. Among others may be drawn from it, of which many contemporary artists might well take heed� the artistic education of those great painters of the Romantic school, of those admirable landscape-painters who, in their own days, were innovators, and discovered many things in Nature of which the world had been ignorant hitherto.

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