Charles Deudon

Charles-Henri Deudon (born September 23, 1832 in Le Cateau-Cambrésis , † May 9, 1914 in Nice ) was a French art collector and patron . He was one of the earliest patrons of Impressionist painters . After his death, his heirs sold the collection, the works of which are now in various museums and private collections.

Life

Charles Deudon's family belonged to the Parisian upper class and had considerable wealth. His British mother had inherited coal mines and miners' settlements in Wales . The men of the Deudon family traditionally took up the profession of notary. Only his father, who was also called Charles, had embarked on a career in the military.

After finishing school, Charles Deudon studied law and completed his studies with a doctorate (docteur en droit). It is not known to what extent he practiced a legal profession. Occasionally he wrote articles for English newspapers and led a dandy life , made possible by his financial independence . He remained unmarried for a long time and joined the elite Cercle de la Rue Royal . This gentlemen's club was mostly made up of bankers and noblemen, including Edmond de Polignac . Deudon lived on Paris' Rue Godot-de-Mauroy in the 1860s and made several trips. He spent the summer months repeatedly in the fashionable seaside resort of Trouville-sur-Mer or in the Swiss spa town of St. Moritz . During the time of the Paris Commune , he lived on his country estate in Saint-Clair-sur-l'Elle in the Manche department .

In the 1870s, Deudon began building an art collection. When and through whom he first got to know impressionist painting is not known. Deudon lived at 13 rue de Turin in the Quartier de l'Europe from 1876 to 1897 . In the immediate vicinity, on Rue de Saint-Pétersbourg, lived the painter Édouard Manet , whom he may have visited in his studio. The art critic Théodore Duret , a friend of Manet, probably advised Deudon on building his collection. The oldest surviving letter from Duret to Deudon is dated October 30, 1878, but the first contact between the two may have been earlier. The year before, on November 21, 1877, Deudon had acquired his first painting by Claude Monet . A few months later, on May 17, 1878, he bought a painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir from the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel . These early acquisitions came at a time when Impressionist painters were still struggling for recognition.

Around 1880 Deudon frequented the Café Anglais restaurant , where he met numerous friends who shared his passion for collecting. These included Gustave Dreyfus , a collector of Renaissance works, and the banker Marcel Bernstein, father of the playwright Henri Bernstein and collector of Manet's works. Deudon also became friends with the banker and later art historian Charles Ephrussi , who had also started to build up an art collection with works by the Impressionists in 1880. This circle of friends also included the art critic Philippe Burty and the writers George Moore , Stéphane Mallarmé and Joris-Karl Huysmans .

Another friend was Henri Cernuschi , who had toured Japan and China with Duret and whose collection of Asian art later formed the basis of the Paris Musée Cernuschi . When Japanese art was on view in Georges Petit's gallery in 1883 , Deudon loaned works from his collection to this effect. Other friends had a special relationship with Pierre-Auguste Renoir. This included Paul Berard , a diplomat who invited Renoir to his Wargemont Castle to portray family members there and through whom Deudon had met Renoir personally in 1879. Then there was the banker Louis Cahen d'Anvers , who had his daughters portrayed by Renoir, and the Salonnière Marguerite Charpentier , who with her husband, the publisher Georges Charpentier , were among Renoir's patrons.

The painters Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, whose works he bought as well as those of Manet, soon belonged to his circle of friends. After his death, Deudon was a member of the exhibition committee for Manet's memorial exhibition in 1884. He was also friends with the painters Léon Bonnat and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes , but without acquiring works from these artists. Deudon bought pictures by the Impressionists when they were still available at relatively low prices. Overall, his collection was not very extensive, but it was of crucial importance as other collectors of his time followed his example, repeatedly establishing contact between the collectors and the artists. When the Impressionist painters gradually found recognition, Deudon stopped his collecting activities.

On August 25, 1894, he married Marie Weber. From this marriage the two sons Charles and Paul emerged. The family moved into a large villa on 32 Boulevard Dubouchage in Nice . From then on he had hardly any contact with his previous circle of friends in Paris. A visit by Pierre-Auguste Renoir to Deudon in Nice is documented for 189. Deudon died in his home on May 1, 1914. After his death, a street in Nice - Rue Deudon - was named after him. He received this honor not for his importance as an early patron of the Impressionist painters, but because he had financially supported a hospital in Nice as a patron.

Deudon as an art collector

For a long time there was little known information about the art collector Charles Deudon. Théodore Duret mentioned him as one of the early collectors of Impressionist painting as early as 1878, but apart from brief entries in the artist's catalog raisonné, there was little evidence of Deudon's life and the origins and scope of his collection. It was not until 1989 that the art historian Anne Distel published her first essay on Deudon, in which she was able to fall back on the previously unpublished correspondence between Deudon and painters such as Claude Monet , Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro from the Deudon family archive.

The earliest documented acquisition of a work of art by Deudon dates back to 1875, when he bought the painting Landscape with Mill , which at the time was ascribed to the Dutch Baroque painter Meindest Hobbema , from an art dealer in Rue Le Peletier, a center of the Parisian art trade, for 800 francs . The first documented picture by an Impressionist painter was Claude Monet's landscape painting Argenteuil , which he acquired in 1877 for only 200 francs, but later exchanged for another picture. In the following years, other paintings by Monet came into his possession. These included interior, après dîner from 1868 to 1869 ( National Gallery of Art ), mills in Westzijderveld from 1871 (private collection), Argenteuil vu du petit-bras de la Seine from 1872 (private collection), the Saint-Lazare station, arrival of a train from 1877 ( Fogg Art Museum ), flowers on the banks of the Seine at Argenteuil from 1877 ( Pola Museum of Art ) and La Route de la Roche-Guyon from 1880 (private collection).

• 

  Claude Monet:
  interior, après dîner

• 

  Claude Monet:
  Mills in Westzijderveld

• 

  Claude Monet:
  Flowers on the banks of the Seine at Argenteuil

• 

  Claude Monet:
  The Saint-Lazare station, arrival of a train

• 

  Alfred Sisley:
  Port-Marly / La machine de Marly

One of the early acquisitions in the collection was The Dancer by Pierre-Auguste Renoir ( National Gallery of Art ), which Deudon acquired from the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in 1878. This was followed by a few other pictures by the painter such as Die Nachdenkliche ( Virginia Museum of Fine Arts ), Young Woman Sewing ( Art Institute of Chicago ), Portrait de femme lisant (private collection), Les Rosiers de Wargemont (private collection), Bouquet devant une glace ( Private collection) and Tête de soubrette (remaining unknown). In 1881 Deudon bought Manet's first painting. The painting The Plum (National Gallery of Art) came into his possession for 3,500 francs . At Manet's estate auction in 1984 he acquired his painting Berthe Morisot with a veil ( Musée du Petit Palais , Geneva) for 240 francs and the pastel Auf der Bank ( Pola Museum of Art ) for 1250 francs. He later bought the painting Two Sailing Boats on Stormy Seas (private collection), also offered for 400 francs on this occasion, from the artist's widow. In addition, Deudon owned the painting Port-Marly / La Machine de Marly (whereabouts unknown) by Alfred Sisley and a painting by Camille Pissarro, which cannot be precisely determined . It is noticeable that there were no works by Edgar Degas or Paul Cézanne in the collection .

• 

  Pierre-Auguste Renoir:
  dancer

• 

  Pierre-Auguste Renoir:
  The thoughtful

• 

  Pierre-Auguste Renoir:
  Young woman sewing

• 

  Édouard Manet:
  The plum

• 

  Édouard Manet:
  On the bench

When more and more collectors became interested in Impressionist works towards the end of the 1890s and prices rose accordingly, the art dealer Durand-Ruel kept an eye out for available paintings that he had sold to art lovers years earlier at moderate prices. In February 1899 he asked the painter Renoir, who was often in the south of France, to look around Deudon's collection. Deudon was interested in the increased value of his collection, but did not sell any of his paintings. Durand-Ruel had more success with Deudon's cousin Eugène Deudon. Charles Deudon had given him a few pictures, which have now found their way back into the Parisian art trade. These included the pastel Auf der Bank by Édouard Manet, the painting Dancer by Renoir and the painting Intérieur, Après dîner by Claude Monet. In addition to Durand-Ruel, the Bernheim-Jeune art dealer was also interested in the Deudon collection. The Bernheims alone offered 100,000 francs for Manet's painting The Plum , which Deudon had acquired for 3500 francs. But Deudon ignored this offer too and kept his collection until the end of his life. After his death in 1919, his heirs sold the collection to the art dealer Paul Rosenberg , who exhibited it in May and June 1922.

literature

• Théodore Duret: Les Peintres impressionnistes: Claude Monet-Sisley-C. Pissaro-Renoir-Berthe Morisot . Heymann et J. Perois, Paris 1878.
• Anne Distel: Charles Deudon (1832-1914) collectionneur in Revue de l'Art , 1989, No. 86. pp. 58–65 Article online .
• Anne Distel: Impressionism: the first collectors . Abrams, New York 1990, ISBN 0-8109-3160-5 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Duret lists the names MM. D'Auriac (a pseudonym, probably Comte Armand Doria ), Etienne Baudry, de Belio (sic), Charpentier, Choquet (sic), Deudon, Dollfus, Faure, Murer, de as early collectors Rasty up. See Théodore Duret: Les Peintres impressionnistes: Claude Monet-Sisley-C. Pissaro-Renoir-Berthe Morisot , p. 9.
2. ↑ Since Monet painted several pictures with motifs from Argenteuil, the painting cannot be precisely identified.