Paul Cézanne

Impressionist Portraits Mary Cassatt

French Impressionist painting is currently the most popular of all European bodies of art. Part of the romance of Impressionism comes from the stories of uphill struggles against the famous Academic painters and critics who dominated 19th-century French art, only to be swept into obscurity by the now famous artists they had scorned. However, a reaction was bound to set in, and during the final decades of the 20th century, a number of politically oriented critics began to argue that far from being radicals, the Impressionists appealed to bourgeois tastes partly because their technique was easy to digest and their subject matter inoffensive. They point out that the industrialization of Europe is rarely reflected in their works, and that they paid little or no attention to the sufferings of the urban poor. Many of them were acutely conscious of their popularity, and eager to cash in on it.

Collecting Impressionism: “Something Solid and Durable” Back to Top

 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.”

Acknowledgements 

Impressionism: Paintings Collected by European Museums is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, in collaboration with the Denver Art Museum and the Seattle Art Museum. Back to Top