THE MAN WHO MADE MONET
...and Renoir, Degas and Pissarro–by buying thousands of their works when nobody else would ( and hiring them to do his decorating). Now a major new show hails the ‘inventor’ of Impressionism
It was a shopping spree to turn a Russian oligarch or Qatari prince green with envy. In January 1872 French art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel saw two still-lifes by painter Edouard Manet hanging in an artist’s studio in Paris. He bought them on the spot, then headed straight to Manet’s own studio and snapped up everything the struggling 40year-old artist had hanging on his walls – 21 paintings for 35,000 francs (€88,000 in today’s money). All in a day.
But that was just a start. Altogether he bought and sold 1,000 Monets and 1,500 Renoirs, together with hundreds of masterpieces by Pissarro, Sisley and Degas, gathering a collection that today would be worth hundreds of millions.
A risk-taker and speculator, Durand-Ruel bought the Impressionist painters when nobody else was interested and when some critics dismissed them as ‘lunatics’. He bought in bulk but he also championed his artists.
‘We would have died of hunger without Durand-Ruel, all we Impressionists,’ said Monet. ‘We owe him everything. He persisted, stubborn, risking bankruptcy 20 times in order to back us.’
A new National Gallery blockbuster show in London, Inventing Impressionism, will display 85 masterpieces that he bought and traded. ‘His greatest achievement was to recognise the value of the Impressionists when they were being ridiculed,’ says curator Anne Robbins.
‘The pictures have been so widely reproduced now and we think of them as pretty and pleasant to look at, that it can be hard to understand how controversial they were. They were seen as profoundly shocking, and the word “Impressionist” was an insult.
‘What this exhibition does is show a lot of stunningly beautiful and famous canvases, but it also looks very closely at the roots of the movement.’
It certainly wasn’t all Monets and Moët all round for the mous- tachioed, bushy-eyebrowed Paul Durand-Ruel. A widower, with five children by the age of 40, he risked everything to back the artists he believed in.
He offered more than financial support though. ‘He was like a life coach,’ says Robbins. He advised them what to paint, encouraged, counselled and consoled them, and slipped them cash for rent or to buy a house.
To keep them within his fold and for his own pleasure, he asked Renoir (who became a friend) to paint a portrait of his children, and even commissioned Monet to decorate doors in his house.
It’s apt that the show is being held in the UK as it was there, rather than France, that Durand-Ruel had his first taste of Impressionism. He escaped the Franco-Prussian War to settle in London in 1870. While there he met fellow French exiles Monet and Pissarro, and bought works from them for a meagre 200 francs each (€470 today).
‘In his gallery at the time he would mainly exhibit mid-19thcentury realist French painting,’ says Robbins, ‘but then he’d start to cunningly slip in a work by Monet or Pissarro. ‘His stock books show he bought his first works by them in the early 1870s for 200 or 300 francs, and by the 1880s he would be spending 700 or 800 francs. The real boom then came in the 1890s after Durand-Ruel had conquered the American market with a big New York show in 1886.’
The Americans didn’t laugh at the works and the French took note. America saved him and from then on Durand-Ruel could lead a more comfortable life.
As a dealer, he was a canny businessman. He would try to buy up everything by an artist to establish a monopoly, and later developed the idea of solo shows to promote them, but National Gallery curator Robbins insists his relationships with the artists were about more than just business. ‘I don’t think he had huge wealth. That wasn’t the point for him. He was dedicated to the artists and the art movement he was supporting. He had business intuition but he had visual intuition too, he had a great eye.’
The show ends with an evocation of a mammoth 1905 exhibition at London’s Grafton Galleries, which had 315 works on display.
‘That was arguably the largest exhibition of Impressionist paintings ever organised – you went from icon to icon,’ says Robbins. ‘It would be absolutely impossible to even attempt to do anything like that anymore. But we have our own tribute to the show, with pictures from around the world.’
Durand-Ruel would faint at auction prices today. It seems he may even have seen and been offered
‘He was like a life coach. He advised them what to paint, and consoled them’
the post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin’s 1892 work When
Will You Marry? when the artist brought it back from Tahiti. The most expensive painting ever sold, it was auctioned last month for $300million. Durand-Ruel had cash-flow problems at the time and passed on Gauguin’s offer of 35 paintings.
But he still had the last laugh. His gamble proved right. Before he died in 1922 he was able to state: ‘Had I passed away at 60, I would have died debt-ridden and bankrupt, surrounded by a wealth of underrated treasures. But my madness had been wisdom.’
Inventing Impressionism is at the National Gallery in London from March 4 to May 31.