Paintings That Caused a Scandal When First Shown

John Singer Sargent, 1883–84. Paris Salon visitors in 1884 mocked a portrait whose sitter they recognized, even though it withheld her name. In the version they saw, Gautreau’s right dress strap slipped down her shoulder. Look for the neatly raised strap now. Sargent repainted the detail after the exhibition.

Henri Matisse, 1905. At the Salon d’Automne, the colorful canvases around this portrait prompted Louis Vauxcelles’s comparison with wild beasts. Look at the green running down Amélie’s face and how little the paint imitates skin. The new palette was conspicuous enough to help supply a name for Fauvism.

Henry Fuseli, 1781. Horace Walpole found this painting shocking at the Royal Academy in 1782. Look at the heavy figure perched on a sleeper’s chest and the horse’s head emerging through the curtains. The painting puts the physical pose of a sleeper and the sights of a nightmare in the same room.

James McNeill Whistler, 1861–62. After the Royal Academy turned down the portrait, a Berners Street gallery showed it in 1862 and used the rejection in its catalog. It went on to the 1863 Salon des Refusés in Paris. Look at how many different whites Whistler finds in Joanna Hiffernan’s dress and the curtain behind her.

John Everett Millais, 1849–50. When the Royal Academy showed the painting in 1850, Charles Dickens attacked its treatment of the Holy Family in Household Words. Look at the splintered wood and crowded tools. The family inhabits a carpenter’s shop whose plain physical details were the very things critics objected to.

Gustave Courbet, 1849–50. At the Paris Salon of 1850–51, critics railed at the life-size mourners and laughed at some of their faces. Scan the red-faced churchwardens and the long row of villagers. Courbet gave a provincial funeral the size usually reserved for biblical or mythological subjects.

William Holman Hunt, 1853. A woman rises from a man’s lap, looking past the furniture and out of the room. At the Royal Academy in 1854, the Art Journal called the work an example of bad taste. The ringless fourth finger and the lavish room provided many viewers with clues to the couple’s relationship.

Édouard Manet, 1868–69. At the 1869 Paris Salon, the caricaturist Cham joked that the shutters should be closed and another critic likened Manet to a house painter. Start with the bright green railing and shutters. Their color seems to press forward as the people look in separate directions.

Thomas Eakins, 1875. Rejected by the art jury for the 1876 Centennial Exhibition, this operating-room portrait appeared in the exposition’s model army hospital. Look at the harsh light on Dr. Gross and the theater rising behind him. One Philadelphia critic defended the painting and rebuked the selectors for sending it to the hospital display.

Marcel Duchamp, 1912. Cubist colleagues objected to the painting before its planned showing at the Salon des Indépendants, and Duchamp withdrew it. It went on view in Barcelona that spring and drew ridicule at the 1913 Armory Show in New York. Follow the overlapping planes downward to find a sequence of steps in a painting that refuses to settle into a single pose.

Philip Guston, 1969. Critics attacked Guston’s return from abstraction to cartoonlike figures when this work appeared at New York’s Marlborough Gallery in 1970. A painter wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood sits at an easel beneath a bare bulb. The hood on his canvas might be his own, making the artist’s role part of the subject.

Francis Bacon, 1944. When the triptych went on view at London’s Lefevre Gallery in April 1945, it caused what the critic John Russell later remembered as consternation. The open mouths and the uncomfortable perches stand out against orange. Nothing else crowds the three figures, so there is very little relief from what viewers found unsettling.