He doled out moral support, even offering Monet a room in his house to use as a studio. He started to buy their work in bulk and paid them a monthly sum as well, dealing with their bills for everything from rent and tailors to paint suppliers and doctors. When he returned from London, Monet and Pissarro introduced him to Renoir, Sisley, Degas and the other leading players of their group and he took them up, too. The artists to whom Durand-Ruel first rendered a service belonged to “the beautiful School of 1830” comprising Courbet and Delacroix and the Barbizon painters Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau and Jean-François Millet. they permanently opened my eyes and reinforced the idea that I might, perhaps, in my own humble way, be of some service to true artists by helping to make them better understood and appreciated”. The paintings represented for him “the triumph of modern art over academic art. It was the 1855 Exposition Universelle, and in particular the 35 pictures by Eugène Delacroix on display there, that converted him. When he took over the business from his father, he initially went about his work with more of a sense of duty than enthusiasm. Durand-Ruel was a conservative who nurtured radicals. The result is clear to see.” The would-be impressionists on the other hand were a heterogenous mix of republican liberals who, in Pissarro, also had one fully fledged anarchist (at one point he was on a police watchlist and his correspondence was regularly intercepted). “In a democracy,” Paul said, “everything goes awry and the blind claim to be steering the boat. Durand-Ruel was a monarchist Catholic patriot, a stance born in part out of the experiences of his grandfather who had been imprisoned by Robespierre during the French Revolution and almost lost his head. The match between the dealer and his painters was not seemingly a natural one. Through 85 paintings, all but one of which passed through Durand-Ruel’s hands, it tells the story of the triumph of impressionism. Durand-Ruel’s achievement as cheerleader, entrepreneur, patron, and helpmeet is the subject of the National Gallery’s new exhibition Inventing Impressionism: The Man who Sold a Thousand Monets. To gain them the recognition he was convinced they deserved, he developed a range of new ways of promoting them that redefined the relationship between dealers and artists. It was a long-term project born of his faith that financial rewards – for the artists as much as himself – would come when the rest of the world saw them the way he did. Innovative artists needed an innovative dealer and Durand-Ruel’s particular genius was not just to spot the talent of the young impressionists, but to promote them indefatigably and create a market for them where previously there had been none. Photograph (Musée d’Orsay) /Hervé Lewandowski. View image in fullscreen Two Dancers Resting by Degas. To think that, had I passed away at 60, I would have died debt-ridden and bankrupt, surrounded by a wealth of underrated treasures.” As he noted: “My madness had been wisdom. ![]() For Durand-Ruel, it was validation of his steadfast support for this group of avant-garde painters which had several times put him on the point of financial ruin. ![]() For Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley and their peers it was final confirmation that their struggle to win acceptance for their unacademic, light-infused paintings had been successful. The exhibition, sometimes known as The Apotheosis of Impressionism, contained 315 pictures and was, and remains, the largest show of impressionist works ever held. This meeting and the chain of introductions, friendships and innumerable business transactions it put in motion was to culminate 24 years later with an exhibition just down the road on Bond Street at the Grafton Galleries. Whether or not the gallerist believed Daubigny’s words of introduction – “This artist will surpass us all” – he liked Monet’s work well enough to buy numerous canvases and, a few days later, paintings by his fellow artist-refugee Camille Pissarro, too. It was in January that year that the landscapist Charles-François Daubigny took him along to the inaptly named German Gallery on New Bond Street and introduced him to the proprietor, another French expat, named Paul Durand-Ruel (1831-1922). ![]() In 1871, having fled the Franco-Prussian war, Claude Monet was living in London. It is another irony that the key figure in the movement was not a painter but, that most maligned of species, a dealer. It is one of the ironies of impressionism, the quintessential French movement, that it had its beginning and its end not in Paris but in London.
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