This work presents the first three reviews of the annual Paris Fine Art Salon of Theophile Gautier, one of the most important art critics in 19th-century France. Written during a crucial transitional phase in French art, the reviews reveal Gautier's emerging aesthetic theories, as well as the artistic, cultural and institutional issues with which French art was engaged at that time: from the Ingres versus Delacroix controversy to the emergence of Romanticism in French sculpture.