The dazzling spoils of a very canny collector
Gauguin and the Impressionists
The first room of the exhibition feels meditative, intense and summery
★★★★★
Alittle over a century ago, Wilhelm Hansen – a Danish insurance magnate – went the whole hog collecting French art. He was 48 when he made his first purchases (two Sisleys, a Pissarro, a Monet and a Renoir) and he bought doggedly. Two years later, a rival pronounced it the “best Impressionist collection in all the world!”
That, bien sûr,
The curators of Gauguin and the Impressionists, an exhibition of Hansen’s spoils at the Royal Academy, have plumped for “the most important collection of 19th-century paintings outside France”, which is actually pretty accurate, though what’s on show is a later iteration of Hansen’s original buying spree, because he had to sell and replace several paintings along the way.
I should start by saying that the show’s title does a disservice to its plum contents, which extend far beyond Impressionism to works of the Romantic, Realist, Barbizon, Symbolist and Fauve schools. It is well stocked with Gauguins though. Hansen had a soft spot for him perhaps because the artist’s wife, Mette, was Danish. The earliest Gauguin here, a charming painting of his daughter Aline asleep from 1881, was even acquired directly from Mette.
Hansen neither came from artistic stock nor had any artistic education (other than a few drawing lessons), but golly, he bought well. Among the works here are some of the finest paintings to have been produced during that rich, radical era, when Paris, above any other city, was crackling with strident voices.
Bubbling away underneath that visual bait, though, is another, arguably more fascinating story concerning the role that events far removed from the actual daubing of paint on canvas – war, politics, commerce, collecting – play in shaping the way that art is understood by later generations.
What’s in the exhibition, then? Date-wise, we begin in the mid 1830s with Corot’s Windmill on the Côte de Picardie and end in 1909 with a zippy still life by Matisse, but these are outliers: the bulk of the works date from the 1840s to the 1890s. They include a flavourful, addictive spread, not least of which is my favourite Gauguin (his 1896 portrait of Vaite “Jeanne” Goupil), and a tangerine-hued still life by Odilon Redon (1901) that it felt a crime to walk away from.
Hansen was very specific about what he wanted: a nutshell collection of French art. Twelve paintings by each of the artists he considered key to the era should do it, he told a friend. Although what he actually assembled is (thankfully) a little more haphazard, it is cogently done and forms a pleasing narrative of modernism’s rising tide.
The exhibition starts with some scene setting: landscapes by Monet, Sisley, Pissarro and company dating from Impressionism’s heyday of the 1860s-1890s. The room feels meditative, intense, summerhumming.
Walk a few short steps, and here is Belle Époque Paris’s blustery rush, conjured ably by Pissarro, and a group of bracing, choppy seascapes (two Monets, one Daubigny). Look out for the Degas sketch of children and a dog in a courtyard, made while the artist was visiting his maternal Creole family in New Orleans, in 1872. Earlier works by Courbet, Delacroix, Ingres and the like fill the second room. Darker in tone, they are equally rapturous: much soft silvery mist, diluted sky and fleecy cloud. It is intriguing to see the range and depth of Hansen’s developing taste. He was among the first to buy into Impressionism in Scandinavia, and yet he did not buy conservatively. He wasn’t a neophyte (as a young man, he had acquired good pieces by Danish Golden Age artists); still, the strength of his eye floats insistently to the fore.
But why switch to French? How did Hansen know to buy into what would become the blue chip movement of the modern age? The catalogue speculates that his interest was triggered by a 1914 show of 19thcentury French works stranded in Copenhagen on the outbreak of the First World War. He might have been politically motivated, too – the French press thought so, marvelling that Hansen’s collection was propaganda promoting French culture.
Then there’s the cash. Hansen wasn’t the only collector from neutral Scandinavia to seize the favourable opportunity created by war. What with the Battles of Somme and Verdun happening on French soil, and America having removed itself from the European market altogether, first-rate works of art were suddenly available for knock-down prices.
Duret had his eyes on the ground during those war years, helping Hansen acquire artists whose works had lately become rare, such as Delacroix and Manet, who happened to be one of Duret’s friends. In 1916, he advised Hansen to buy an 1882 still life, Basket of Pears. It’s here at the RA, a juicy little thing – so loved by Hansen, it is said, that he liked to bring it out to show dinner guests, “as an extra dessert”. Such was his fame among the Parisian collectors that he was “received like a little god”, a rival wrote. “They are all... putting their best things to one side.”
Too often we forget – and this exhibition cleverly reminds us – just how much the collecting of art shapes our later interpretation of it. Here, for instance, how middle-class buyers like Hansen and the new breed of eager individual dealers he bought from were the final nail in the coffin for the once almighty arbiter of taste, the Salon. The Ancien Régime-style system of patronage that still held sway when Delacroix and Corot were starting out had almost vanished by the time Hansen was acquiring their work.
I point this out not because it makes collections such as Hansen’s any less “true” but because when, as here, the opportunity comes along to see a collection of its calibre, presented in such a way that is almost visible in the making, it should be relished.