Making the Impressionists

By P.W.

PAUL DURAND-RUEL was a French art dealer who effectively made the market for Impressionist paintings. He was the first person to promote the artists; he supported them financially through the bad times; and he eventually found an audience that embraced their works as keenly as he did himself. "Without him," said Claude Monet, "we wouldn’t have survived." His is a heartening story of conviction, imagination and determination and a new exhibition at the National Gallery in London does it justice. While its plot is carried by texts on the wall, aided by a broadly chronological display and period photographs, the 85 works, nearly all of which Durand-Ruel dealt, act as a choir, singing the praises of a bold, risk-taking visionary.

“Inventing Impressionism: Paul Durand-Ruel and the Modern Art Market” will almost certainly draw crowds. Paintings by Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-August Renoir, Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot and their artist friends are hugely popular with the public and chased by collectors. But in the early 1870s, when Durand-Ruel, the successful, art-dealing son of an art dealer, first fell for them, such works were reviled, practically unsellable. He scooped them up, buying some 12,000 Impressionist works in total, including 1,000 Monets and 1,500 Renoirs. He used other stock as collateral to raise the capital needed to pay these struggling artists monthly stipends, produce illustrated catalogues, engage the press, and stage what were at the time very unusual one-man shows. Durand-Ruel also opened branches of his gallery abroad, and it was the Americans who were the first to embrace Impressionism, helped perhaps by the efforts of Mary Cassatt, one of Durand-Ruel’s artists and a well-connected Philadelphian. Yet decades were to pass before his commitment was reflected in strong sales.

The show opens with a photograph of the Grand Salon in Durand-Ruel’s Paris apartment. The furnishings—gilded armchairs, crystal chandelier, curlicue mouldings—hark back to the 18th century. But every vertical surface is covered in contemporary, Impressionist art. Even the doors (which are part of the National's exhibition) have panels that were created by Monet in 1882. The explanation was not purely aesthetic: the room was an astute marketing tool offering evidence to those who asked to visit that one could live intimately, even joyously, with these works.

Durand-Ruel first met Monet and Pissarro in London, at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, when they were all refugees in London. He saw, liked and bought their works, among them Monet's “The Thames below Westminster” (pictured), which can be seen in the show. The following year, back in Paris, he saw two paintings by Manet for the first time at the studio of an established painter, Alfred Stevens, and immediately bought “Moonlight over the Port of Boulogne” and “The Salmon”. The latter is a memorable still-life that includes what one critic called “The most cruelly sour lemon ever painted”. Impressionist painting is strongly associated with pastels and sunlight; Manet made his magic with black. Within a month Durand-Ruel had bought 20 works directly from his studio.

Not every painting in the show is a masterpiece. The catalogue describes Degas’s “Peasant Girls Bathing in the Sea” (c. 1878) as “challenging”. Some might call its indistinct figures and smeary background a mess, unrecognisable to many as a work by his hand. Yet there are a surprising number of moments in this exhibition when the fame, the big prices, the over-familiarity and the hype evaporate and viewers are able to see something extraordinary in the picture in front of them, much as Durand-Ruel was the first to do over a century ago. Renoir’s “Dance in the Country” (1883) is just such a case. A couple twirls on a terrace. It is their day off and hot. Her red bonnet is tied securely, but they are moving so fast that his straw hat has fallen to the ground. The man is smitten; the woman is enchanted. The viewer joins the dance.

“Inventing Impressionism” is at the National Gallery in London until May 31st 2015