Georges Charpentier

Georges Charpentier
photographed by Émile Zola

Georges Charpentier (born December 22, 1846 in Paris , † November 15, 1905 there ) was a French publisher and art collector. In his publishing house the works of Émile Zola , Gustave Flaubert , Guy de Maupassant , Alphonse Daudet , Edmond de Goncourt and Joris-Karl Huysmans appeared . He promoted the impressionist painters and, together with his wife, the Salonnière Marguerite Charpentier, built up an important art collection, which included works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir in particular .

biography

Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Portrait of a Man (Georges Charpentier)

Title page of the novel L'Assommoir ( The Murderer ) by Émile Zola, published by Georges Charpentier

Georges Charpentier was born in Paris in 1846 to the publisher Gervais Charpentier and his wife Aspasie Justine, née Générelly. After the marriage was divorced, Georges Charpentier lived with his mother. His father kept him away from the business of the publishing house he founded in 1838, so that Georges Charpentier was initially able to pursue his private inclinations - financially secure. After his father died in 1871, Georges Charpentier inherited the publishing house in which well-known French romantic authors such as Chateaubriand , Balzac , Gautier , Sand , Musset , Vigny and Hugo were published as well as the French editions of the works of Goethe , Schiller , Shakespeare and Dante and Homer .

When the 25-year-old Georges Charpentier took over the publishing house, he first brought the writer Maurice Dreyfous as a partner in the management of the company. The first important commitment under Georges Charpentier was Émile Zola , who was still at the beginning of his literary career , with whom Charpentier soon became a personal friend. Shortly thereafter, Gustave Flaubert , Guy de Maupassant , Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans , Alphonse Daudet , Théodore de Banville , Léon Hennique , Henri Céard , Edmond Duranty , Paul Alexis and Edmond de Goncourt followed .

Since October 24, 1871, Georges Charpentier was married to Marguerite Lemonnier , daughter of the jeweler Alexandre-Gabriel Lemonnier . From this marriage the children Georgette (1872–1945), Marcel Gustave (1874–1876), Paul (1875–1895) and Jeanne (1880–1940) were born. The godfather of the son Paul was Émile Zola. The couple initially lived in a house at 28 Quai du Louvre before moving to 11 rue de Grenelle in 1875. Here Marguerite Charpentier established a political and literary salon in which , in addition to the publisher's authors, politicians such as Léon Gambetta , Jules Grévy and Georges Clemenceau frequented. Painters such as Édouard Manet , Claude Monet , Edgar Degas , Pierre-Auguste Renoir , Alfred Sisley and Gustave Caillebotte also came to visit. Other guests were the composers Emmanuel Chabrier , Camille Saint-Saëns and Jules Massenet as well as stage stars such as Yvette Guilbert , Jeanne Samary and Sarah Bernhardt .

The Charpentiers built up a small but important art collection from around the mid-1870s. There is evidence of the purchase of three paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir by Georges Charpentier at an auction in 1875. Shortly afterwards, the Charpentiers met Renoir personally and he received several portrait commissions. After individual portraits of the wife ( Madame Georges Charpentier , Musée d'Orsay ) and the children Georgette and Paul, the famous group portrait of Madame Charpentier and her children ( Metropolitan Museum of Art ) was created in 1878 , for which Renoir received good reviews at the Paris Salon the following year . Renoir, who, like Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley, was also financially supported by Charpentier, referred to himself as the Charpentier's "private painter" at times. In 1879 Renoir made a portrait of Georges Charpentier ( Barnes Foundation ). Other painters represented in the Charpentiers collection were Édouard Manet and Paul Cézanne . The contact with the latter was probably made through the mediation of Zola. In 1879 Charpentier founded the weekly La Vie moderne , which took on literary, artistic and social issues. His wife Marguerite probably had a decisive influence on this. Renowned authors such as Armand Silvestre , Théodore de Banville, Alphonse Daudet, Edmond Duranty and the journalist Edmond Renoir , brother of the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, wrote for the magazine headed by Émile Bergerat . The editorial rooms at the entrance to the Passage des Princes , a shopping mall on the Boulevard des Italiens , were connected to a room for art exhibitions. Here Charpentier offered the Impressionist painters in particular the opportunity to exhibit their latest works, something that was difficult for him elsewhere. Both Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet had their first solo exhibition in these rooms. In addition, Giuseppe de Nittis and Édouard Manet also showed their works here.

In the early 1880s, the Charpentier publishing house ran into financial difficulties. Charpentier initially turned down an offer from the Michel Lévy Frères publishing house and instead initially sold land and parts of the art collection in order to remain independent as an entrepreneur. In 1883 he had to stop the magazine La Vie modern and sell parts of the company to the publishers Charles Marpon and Ernest Flammarion . Although the publishing house had an upturn with the success of Zola's novel Germinal in 1885, it could no longer regain its previous importance. Eugène Fasquelle , a close colleague of Charpentier, married the daughter of Charles Marpon in 1887. After Marpon's death in 1890, Fasquelle became Charpentier's business partner.

In 1895, Charpentier's son Paul died of typhus while serving in the military at the age of 20. Charpentier withdrew from the business the following year and sold his shares in Fasquelle. The publisher merged with the Grasset publishing house in 1959 and continues to exist today as Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle . In the last years of their lives, the Charpentiers lived in a house on Avenue Victor-Hugo and had the Villa Le Paradou built in Royan . The name is taken from a fictional estate in Zola's novel La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret . Here, too, the Charpentiers received well-known personalities of their time - albeit on a smaller scale. For example, the art critic Théodore Duret and the actress Sarah Bernhardt came to visit. A repeated guest was Charpentier's friend Émile Zola. The friendship continued during the Dreyfus Affair , when Charpentier - like Georges Clemenceau - was one of Zola's supporters.

Georges Charpentier died in Paris in 1905. His wife died the previous year. The two surviving children, Georgette and Jeanne, had the Charpentiers' art collection auctioned off in 1907. Only the portrait of the mother came into the possession of the French state in 1919 with the help of the Société des Amis du Luxembourg (Society of Friends of the Musée Luxembourg) as a gift from the daughter Georgette - now Madame Tournon - and today belongs to the collection of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

literature

• Anne Distel: Impressionism: the first collectors . Abrams, New York 1990, ISBN 0-8109-3160-5 .
• Michel Robida: Le Salon Charpentier et les Impressionnistes . Bibliothèque des arts, Paris 1958.
• John Rewald : The History of Impressionism . 7th edition. DuMont, Cologne 2001, ISBN 3-7701-5561-0 .