Heine's first compositions after settling in Paris were a series of articles on the Salon, the annual exhibition of new paintings, which appeared in fifteen consecutive instalments in Cotta's Morning Journal between 27 October and 16 November 1831. The title they bore in that publication – ‘Exhibition of Paintings in Paris’ (‘Gemäldeausstellung in Paris’) – was changed to French Painters (Französische Maler) when the articles were gathered together to form part of a volume of miscellaneous prose-writings which Heine called The Salon. Volume I (Der Salon. Erster Band); this first appeared in 1834 and again, in a second, unchanged edition, in 1849. Eventually there were to be four volumes of The Salon, matching the four volumes of Pictures of Travel which Heine had published before leaving Germany. Many of his works also appeared in French translation from now on; he kept a watchful eye on these, but although he occasionally pretended otherwise, his own French was never quite good enough to allow him to compose such translations on his own.

French Painters draws on Shakespeare to convey Heine's impression of a painting by Émile-Aubert Lassore – he quotes an English phrase, ‘the modesty of nature’, from Hamlet's advice to the players; and in a later addition he plays the most amusing of all his many variations on Lear's ‘every inch a king’ when he caricatures Louis Philippe rising up ‘in dickster Majestät, jedes Pfund ein König’ (in most portly majesty, every pound a king).