Paul Durand-Ruel

Commercial of art French, Paul Durand-Ruel (1831 - 1922) imposes the principal impressionist painters on the market of art by organizing Exposition S of scale, in particular with London and New York. It takes again the gallery of his father in 1865. It is interested then, as of the beginning of the Années 1870, with Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro and Auguste Renoir.

Biography

The father of Durand-Ruel is walking of Article In 1865, the Paul young person takes again the reins of the family company, which represents in particular Corot and the school of landscape painting of Barbizon in general. During Years 1860 and with the beginning of the year 1870, Paul shows a brilliant defender and an excellent salesman of this school. Durand-Ruel will quickly weave a network of relationships to a group of painters who will be quickly known under the name of Impressionnistes.

During the War free-Prussian of 1870-1871, Durand-Ruel leaves Paris to take refuge with London, where it finds a certain number of French artists, with the number of which Charles-François Daubigny, Monet and Pissarro. In December 1870, it opens the first of a series of ten Annual Exposures of the Company of the French Artists to his new London gallery, to the 168 New Bond Street, under the direction of Charles Deschamps.

Since 1870, he recognizes the potential artistic and commercial Impressionists and his first exposure of importance is held in 1872, always in London. Finally, Durand-Ruel holds of the impressionist exposures (with inter alia the participation of the American painter expatriate in England James Abbott McNeill Whistler) in his Parisian gallery and to that of London. He takes along their works to New York, making thus much to establish the popularity of the movement in the United States.

During three last decades of the XIXe Century, Paul Durand-Ruel becomes the most famous French galerist, just as the principal commercial support of the Impressionists all over the world. He succeeds in creating a market of impressionist Art as well in the United States as in Europe. He goes as far as proposing to the artists to pay them in the month, the tie thus of misery, n the other hand of the exclusiveness in their production. By assuming this exclusiveness, Durand-Ruel can thus speculate, with leisure, in the dimension of the artists whom it signs.

A capitalist visionary

Durand-Ruel thus imposes on the market art a new dynamics. While being involved in debt and while pre-empting the request, it breaks completely with the tergiversations of the former merchants like the Malgras father, who had, according to Emile Zola, “based its business on the fast renewal of its small capital, never not buying the morning without knowing to which of his amateurs it would sell the evening”.

Art becomes a commercial value almost like another, subjected to the risks of the Spéculation. Thanks to the credit which he enjoys near financial rich person, like Edward or Feder, Durand-Ruel pushes artificially with the rise, in particular by organizing fictitious sales, by repurchasing with the biddings the fabrics put on sale by his care in the rooms of the Hôtel Drouot.

Durand-Ruel is, throughout his career, in intense competition with the Parisian galerist Georges Petit (1856-1920).

The crisis of 1882

Following the Crash of the General union in 1882, Durand-Ruel is put in residence to refund its creditors. Not being able more to provide for the needs for " ses" painters, Durand-Ruel is constrained to sell his stock of impressionist fabrics at low prices, thus causing the fall of the courses. Zola describes perfectly this event in its work, Work (1886): “Panic had been put among amateurs, taken panic of people of Stock Exchange, under the wind of the fall, the prices crumbled day in day, one did not sell more anything”.

The impressionist painters, ruined by the financial rout of Durand-Ruel, try to survive by carrying out all kinds of food work and by selling their fabrics to merchants of art without scale, who sell, under the bridge of Paris, the fabrics according to their size.

Random links: