The man who 'invented' Impressionism

by Alastair Sooke

Few movements in the history of art feel as familiar as Impressionism. Barely a week goes by without Monet and his contemporaries generating headlines for one reason or another. Impressionist paintings attract astronomical prices at auction. Impressionist exhibitions are mainstays at museums because they offer a guaranteed way of drumming up a crowd.

Even people with a cursory interest in modern art have heard the story of the notorious show of 1874, when a group of independent French artists staged what would become known as the first Impressionist exhibition away from the official Salon.

Surely there is nothing new to say about the movement that launched a thousand tea towels?

Actually, perhaps there is. Inventing Impressionism, a recent exhibition at the National Gallery in London, offered an ingenious, fresh take on a well-worn subject. Following its opening, one British art critic, Richard Dorment, hailed it as the most significant Impressionist exhibition in the UK for two decades.

Filled with masterpieces by Monet, Pissarro, Degas, Renoir, Sisley and Manet, the exhibition tells the story of the far-sighted French art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel (1831-1922). During the course of his long career, it is estimated that up to 12,000 Impressionist paintings passed through Durand-Ruel's hands.

According to the exhibition's argument, which is based on recent research conducted in the Durand-Ruel family archives, Durand-Ruel did not create Impressionism - that, of course, was the achievement of the artists themselves. But he did discover the movement and bring it to universal attention. In other words, he was responsible for branding and promoting Impressionism. Without him, the movement wouldn't be the popular juggernaut it is today.

Birth of a movement

So what do we know about this Svengali of modern art? Surprisingly, given his risk-taking taste for the avant-garde, his temperament was conservative. The son of a successful art dealer, he grew up to become a conventional, haute-bourgeois Frenchman. "He was a monarchist and very Catholic, and he valued his probity," says Christopher Riopelle of the National Gallery, one of the curators of the exhibition, which has already visited Paris and will travel to the Philadelphia Museum of Art this summer.

Having followed in his father's footsteps, Durand-Ruel was interested at first in the generation preceding the Impressionists: the likes of Delacroix and Courbet, as well as Corot, Millet and Rousseau. His conversion to Impressionism occurred in 1870, when he was living in exile in London during the Franco-Prussian War.

The French painter Daubigny introduced him to Monet and Pissarro, who were also exiled, and he fell in love with their work at once. He bought several pictures by them, including a panorama of London's Green Park by Monet and a view of the residential suburb Sydenham by Pissarro, who later wrote, "Without him, we should have died of hunger in London."

Back in Paris by 1872, he spotted two paintings by Édouard Manet, including a stunning still life called The Salmon (1869), in the studio of another artist. On a whim, he bought them both - as well as 21 other pictures that he saw when he visited Manet's studio later that same month. In that spree alone, he spent 35,000 francs on paintings by Manet - which, in 1872, was an extremely bold and risky thing to do. In fact, his extravagant spending in these early years, when Impressionism as yet had no market to speak of, almost bankrupted him. But he felt sure that his gamble would eventually pay off.

Making money off Monet

In time, it did - thanks largely to various strategies that he concocted in order to build a market for Impressionism. He masterminded the second Impressionist exhibition of 1876 at his own gallery, ensuring that professional standards were employed. Later he inaugurated a series of one-man shows for individual Impressionist artists that helped win them serious attention.

He allowed curious visitors to enter his elegant, art-bedecked apartment, which functioned as an unofficial showroom. And he persuaded wealthy Americans to start purchasing Impressionist pictures. "The Americans don't criticise, they buy," he said. "As a result, a group of artists who were largely reviled became one of the most popular art movements in the world," says Riopelle. "This did not just happen. Manipulations had to be done. And one of the prime manipulators was Durand-Ruel."

Perhaps his greatest coup, though, came towards the end of his life. In 1905, at the Grafton Galleries in London, he organised a mammoth exhibition of Impressionism boasting 315 works of art, including 196 from his own collection.With many impressive, large canvases such as Manet's portrait of Eva Gonzalès (1870) and Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880-81), it has been described as the greatest exhibition of Impressionist art ever mounted. And even though London's sluggish collectors didn't take to it (only 13 sales were recorded, almost exclusively to foreigners), it would have a lasting impact upon perceptions of the movement.

"By this point, Durand-Ruel was an old man," says Riopelle, "and he decided to make a final great statement of what he had done - to write, if you will, the history of Impressionism so far. And by and large the story of Impressionism that we still believe today was the story laid out on those walls in that triumphant exhibition of 1905. In the true sense of the word, Durand-Ruel really did 'invent' Impressionism."

Alastair Sooke is art critic of The Daily Telegraph and this article was originally published in BBC Culture