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| Richard Parkes Bonington (England) Venetian Scene ca. 1828 watercolor Wallace Collection, London |
"According to Walter Benjamin, Western art moves away from having a sacred value towards having exhibition value. Art's value becomes secular, aesthetic and social. It moves from sacred buildings to private ones and gradually becomes more public: aristocrats and monarchs build collections of art and curious objects, which are displayed to their peers; the bourgeois class follows suit and the public museum is created. Eventually, the public, including members of the lower classes, are allowed in, to be educated into the great heritage of the culture that sits atop them: exhibition value constrains works to being portable, of recognizable form (e.g. a framed painting, a statue on a plinth), and exchangeable. From the late seventeenth century onwards, art as an institution develops, including galleries, museums, criticism and a public of connoisseurs. This setting of art excludes noise – audiences must behave correctly, demurely; buildings must clearly show works that are autonomous and simultaneously part of a narrative. Far from disrupting this, modern art leads to a booming of the art institution and fuels the idea of art history as a narrative, where we move from one picture to the next. But modern art does introduce noise, in the form of avant-gardism. Even if ultimately this adds to the teleological story of art, at any given stage from the 1850s onwards, some part of art was regarded as noise – as not carrying meaning, lacking skill, not being appropriate, being disturbing of morals, and so on."
– from Noise / Music : A History by Paul Hegarty (Continuum, 2007)
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| Carl Heinrich Bloch (Denmark) Samson and the Philistines 1863 oil on canvas Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen |
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| Andrea Appiani (Milan) Toilet of Juno ca. 1811 canvas Pinacoteca Civica, Brescia |
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| Emile Bernard (France) Women Bathing 1889 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bronemisza, Madrid |
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| Carolus-Duran (France) After swimming 1899 oil on canvas private collection |
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| Théodore Chassériau (France) Sophie leaping into the sea from the Leucadian promontory ca. 1840 watercolor Louvre |
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| Léon Lhermitte (France) Market at Château-Thierry 1879 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (France) Andromache and Astyanax ca. 1813-24 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (France) Justice and Divine Vengeance pursuing Crime 1805-06 oil on canvas Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Carle Vernet (France) Arrival of Emigrés with the Duchesse de Berry on the French Coast early 19th century oil on panel private collection |
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| Horace Vernet (France) Mazeppa 1826 oil on canvas Kunsthalle, Bremen |
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| Horace Vernet (France) Invalid submitting petition to Napoleon at parade in the courtyard of the Tuileries Palace 1838 canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Nicolas-Antoine Taunay (France) Landscape with Aqueduct 1810 oil on canvas Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Édouard Vuillard (France) In the Room 1869 oil on cardboard Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |