Paul Durand-Ruel

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Marcellin Desboutin :
Portrait Paul Durand-Ruel (1882)

Paul-Marie Joseph Durand-Ruel (short: Paul Durand-Ruel) (born October 31, 1831 in Paris ; † February 5, 1922 there ) was a French art dealer and gallery owner. Through his commitment to the artists of impressionism and his innovations in the gallery business , he is one of the most important personalities of the art scene in the second half of the 19th century.

Live and act

family

Paul Durand-Ruel's parents, Jean-Marie Fortuné Durand and his wife Marie-Fernande Ruel, initially ran a stationery shop in the Latin Quarter of Paris . The business was then expanded to include painting supplies and a small art shop was added. The owners often received works of art from the artists in return for brushes and colors. Durand-Ruel married Jeanne Marie Eva Lafon (1841–1871) in 1862. The marriage had five children, including sons Joseph and George, who later also joined the family business.

Professional beginnings

In 1859 Paul Durand-Ruel opened his first gallery in the Rue de la Paix . The artists exhibited initially included representatives of the Barbizon school and realism such as Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot , Théodore Rousseau , Gustave Courbet , Charles-François Daubigny and François Bonvin , of whom he mainly showed landscape paintings and still lifes.

After his gallery moved to the expensive Rue Lafitte in 1867 , he had the rooms there extensively converted. Here he introduced a new form of presentation in which he only showed pictures at eye level and avoided the previous full-surface hanging, in which the paintings were hung close together. This gave each painting the space to be able to affect the viewer and better lighting. In addition, he was the first to waive an entrance fee for the gallery. Paul Durand-Ruel later paid his artists monthly salaries so that they could concentrate on their work and not be dependent on the sale of individual works.

Impressionist gallery owner

Pierre-Auguste Renoir:
Portrait of Paul Durand-Ruel (1910)

To escape the Franco-Prussian War and its aftermath, Durand-Ruel went to London in 1870, where he met Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro . In 1871 he bought works by Monet for the first time. He set up branches of his gallery at 168 New Bond Street in London and at 4 Rue du Persil in Brussels before returning to Paris in 1872.

In the same year he bought 23 paintings from Édouard Manet for a total of 35,000 francs. He also acquired large-scale works of art at an early age from the other artists who would later be called Impressionists. In addition to Manet, Monet and Pissarro, the artists in his gallery with whom he was also friends included Edgar Degas , Pierre-Auguste Renoir , Alfred Sisley and Paul Cézanne . Despite Durand-Ruel's efforts and the exhibitions he organized, most of the works of art remained unsaleable. These exhibitions also included the second Impressionist exhibition in Durand-Ruel's rooms at 11 rue Le Peletier in 1876 .

personality

The private Paul Durand-Ruel is described by his biographer as very conservative. During the Third Republic, he was an ardent supporter of the monarchy and spoke out against a separation of church and state. Paul Durand-Ruel condemned the Paris Commune and was on the side of the anti-Semitic Dreyfus opponents in the Dreyfus affair . However, this did not prevent him from exhibiting artists in his gallery, such as the Communard Gustave Courbet, the Jewish anarchist Camille Pissarro and the avowed Republicans Édouard Manet and Claude Monet. The relationship with “his” painters has not been equally good over the years. Some painters switched to other gallery owners, others occasionally sold pictures behind his back. A close friendship existed with Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who portrayed him and his family.

Entrepreneur

In 1883 Durand-Ruel organized several, not particularly successful, exhibitions in Berlin, Rotterdam, London and Boston. The hard-to-sell pictures and an affair over a forged Daubigny brought Durand-Ruel to the brink of bankruptcy in 1884. It was only the painter Mary Cassatt who established the connection to wealthy American collectors such as Sarah Choate Sears from Boston, Louisine W. Havemeyer from New York and Bertha Honoré Palmer from Chicago. Invited by James F. Sutton and the American Art Association, Durand-Ruel shipped around 300 paintings by Renoir, Manet, Monet, Degas and Sisley to New York in 1886, helping the artists to break through via a detour to the United States.

In 1887 Durand-Ruel opened a branch on Fifth Avenue in New York, which ensured the gallery owner's continued financial success. At the Grafton Galleries in London, Durand-Ruel organized an Impressionist exhibition of almost 300 paintings in early 1905, including a. with works by Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Monet, Morisot , Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley.

From 1891 to his death in 1922, Durand-Ruel sold around 12,000 paintings and organized over 200 exhibitions. After that, an estimated one-third of all Impressionist paintings came up for sale through his gallery. Later, however, the gallery owner's sure instinct failed and Paul Durand-Ruel did not recognize the quality of artists like Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse .

Exhibitions

posthumously

literature

  • Pierre Assouline : Grâces lui soient rendues. Paul Durand-Ruel, le marchand des impressionnistes. Plon, Paris 2002 ISBN 2-259-19302-1 .
  • Elke Stegemann (ed.): French impressionists. Homage to Durand-Ruel. Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg 1970. (Catalog of the exhibition of the same name, November 28, 1970 to January 24, 1971.)
  • Lionello Venturi : Les archives de l'impressionnisme. Lettres de Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley et autres; mémoires de Paul Durand-Ruel; documents . Franklin Books, New York 1968 (reprint of the New York edition 1939).
  • Cent ans d'impressionnisme, 1874–1974. Homage to Paul Durand-Ruel. Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris 1974. (exhibition catalog)

Web links

Commons : Paul Durand-Ruel  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Paul Durand-Ruel. The bet on impressionism: Manet, Monet, Renoir. In: Exhibition from October 9, 2014 to February 8, 2015. Musee du Luxembourg, 2015, archived from the original ; accessed on October 10, 2017 .
  2. ↑ Peter Kropmanns: From the street of pictures in the world. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , January 21, 2015.
  3. ↑ He was the Impressionist dealer in FAZ on March 11, 2015, page 9
personal data
SURNAME Durand-Ruel, Paul
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Durand-Ruel, Paul-Marie Joseph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French gallery owner and art dealer
DATE OF BIRTH October 31, 1831
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH February 5, 1922
Place of death Paris