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In the early years of Impressionism, artists struggled to find markets for their work,
and many lived hand-to-mouth. Impressionism changed when artists quarreled with one
another, withdrew from exhibitions, or, like Monet and Renoir, reverted to a more
Academic style they hoped would lure buyers. Cézanne also turned away from Impressionism,
disappointed that he hadn’t been able “to make of Impressionism something solid and
durable like the art of the museums.”
However,
one visionary Paris art dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, recognized the greatness of
Impressionism as early as 1870. “A true picture dealer should also be an enlightened
patron; he should, if necessary, sacrifice his immediate interest to his artistic
convictions,” Durand-Ruel wrote. He regularly bought, sold, and promoted Impressionist
paintings during the early years. Finally, in the 1880s and ‘90s, the world the
Impressionists painted began to embrace them. American collectors were largely
responsible for this reversal of fortune, buying enough paintings to keep several artists
at work. The Musée de Luxembourg in Paris mounted the first museum exhibition of
Impressionist art in 1897, and an exhibition at the 1900 World Exposition sealed the
artists’ reputations. Paintings sold twenty-five years earlier for a mere fifty francs,
noted Durand-Ruel, now fetched 50,000 francs.
What caused the public’s change of heart? “Ironically,” writes art historian Ann Dumas,
“the Impressionists” former status as renegades enhanced their appeal to the
connoisseurship and speculative skills of the bourgeois collector...(it was) a new art
for a new class that wanted images of the world they inhabited.”
Perhaps more crucial to its present-day popularity is the broadly appealing colour,
spontaneity, and freshness of Impressionist art. Before the first exhibition in 1874, the
art critic Armand Silvestre observed of these paintings, “A blond light pervades them,
and everything is gaiety, clarity, spring festivals, golden evenings or apple trees in
blossom. They are windows opening on the joyous countryside, on rivers full of pleasure
boats stretching into the distance, on a sky which shines with light mists, on the
outdoor life, panoramic and charming.”
Impressionism: Paintings Collected by
European Museums
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