Stuart Macbeth is given an insight into the collection of the great art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel.

  • Inventing Impressionism: Paul Durand-Ruel and the Modern Art Market
  • The National Gallery, London

“You’ve never heard of him”, my audio guide asserts. For this exhibition at the National Gallery isn’t about a big name artist. Instead it focuses on a single art dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel. Monet said the Impressionists “would have died of hunger” without him.

This is the man who, when “people burst into laughter” at the second Impressionist group show in 1876, ensured that he had the last laugh. That show boasted works by “five or six lunatics” including Manet, Degas, Renoir and Morisot. Today they’re household names, all on display in this exhibition.

Durand-Ruel’s devotion saw the value of their work rocket at the end of the 19th Century. Smash exhibitions in New York and London secured their reputations. And eventually, earned the dealer a fortune.

Durand-Ruel’s career is a fascinating premise for grouping these works together. The exhibition opens with portraits of the his family. Widowed at 40, with five children under the age of nine, he never re-married.

The second room moves on to more engaging pictures. Here are earlier 19th century French works sold by Durand-Ruel, whose business was by not limited to buying and selling Impressionists. Paintings include a robust Still Life with Apples by Courbet. There are also two oils by Delacroix, whose “incomparable brightness” ignited the dealer’s interest in art as a young man, when he inherited his father’s business. .

Pictures by Monet and Pissarro hang in the next room. Durand-Ruel had met them in 1870, when all three had moved to London to escape the Franco-Prussian war. Famous paintings by Manet follow including The Salmon, on loan from the Shelbourne Museum in Vermont.

It was in 1872 that Durand-Ruel visited Manet’s studio and famously, bought everything. Bulk-buying was a hallmark technique. Durand-Ruel also pioneered in distributing prints, and in promoting the importance of the art review. Through these and crafty exclusivity deals, Durand-Ruel was able to control his artists’ outputs, influencing the value of their work.

Manet was not marketable at the time. Nor were Pissarro, Morisot, Degas, Sisley or Renoir, all of whom feature as the exhibition continues. Paintings are re-united from Durand-Ruel organized group shows - and from solo Impressionist exhibitions held from 1883 onwards.

One of the successes of this exhibition is bringing together five of Monet’s Poplar paintings. Made in the 1890s they capture the dazzling effects of the seasons on poplar trees. It’s a thrill to see them hang in sequence, re-assembled from collections in London, Paris, Philadelphia and Tokyo.

The exhibition closes with paintings shown together at Durand-Ruel’s 1905 exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in London. Originally comprising 315 paintings this has been called the largest and finest exhibition of Impressionist painting ever held. Period photographs give a sense of the scale of that show. You can spot masterpieces displayed here as they were displayed over a century ago. The inclusion of Monet’s Lavacourt Under Snow is notable because a public campaign at the time successfully purchased the picture for the National Gallery, who refused to admit such modern nincompoopery into their collections.

Oxford Mail:

Manet's The Salmon

Too many Impressionist masterpieces, I’m sad to say, still remind me of the sort of greetings cards I’d buy my Mum. But Inventing Impressionism as an exhibition is a success. It presents all these works in a way that’s always interesting, engaging and unpretentious. Looking through Durand-Ruel’s eyes opens a fresh view point to an over exposed period of art history, illuminating the passions of a man who has been called “the first of the great modern dealers”.

  • Inventing Impressionism runs at the National Gallery until 31 May.
  • Advance tickets from www.nationagallery.org.uk