How did Charles Baudelaire begin his career as an art critic?

Charles Baudelaire established himself in the Parisian cultural milieu not as a poet, but as an art critic through his reviews of the Salons of 1845 and 1846.1

Inspired by the example of the Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, Baudelaire used these reviews to elaborate on a wide-ranging theory of modern painting. In his essays, he urged artists to celebrate and express the "heroism of modern life," marking the beginning of his influential career as a critic who championed the possibilities of modern art.12