Paul Durand-Ruel
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Portrait Paul Durand-Ruel
Paul Durand-Ruel (1831 – 1922) was a French art dealer who is associated with the Impressionists. He was one of the first modern art dealers who provided support to his painters with stipends and solo exhibitions.
Durand-Ruel's father was a picture dealer. In 1865 young Paul took over the family business, which represented artists such as Corot and the Barbizon school, and he soon established a relationship with a group of painters who would become known as the Impressionists. His first major exhibition of their work took place at his London gallery in 1872. He also brought their work to New York, doing much to establish the popularity of Impressionist art in the United States.
[edit] Impressionism
Initially during the 1860s and early 1870s Paul Durand-Ruel was an important advocate and successful art dealer of the Barbizon School of French landscape painting. However Durand-Ruel realized the artistic and fashionable potential of Impressionism as early as 1870. During the final three decades of the 19th century Paul Durand-Ruel became the best known art dealer and most important commercial advocate of French Impressionism in the world. He succeeded in establishing the market for Impressionism in the United States as well as in Europe. Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, are among the important Impressionist artists that Durand-Ruel helped to establish.
[edit] Biographical notes
During the Franco-Prussian War, of 1870-1871 the Paris art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel escaped to London, where he met up with a number of French artists including Charles-François Daubigny, Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro.[1]
Apparently realizing that fashions in the art world were ever changing, Impressionism as practiced by the younger artists he was meeting in London seemed to be the logical successor to the Barbizon School. Durand-Ruel quickly became a strong proponent of their work.
In December 1870 he opened the first of ten Annual Exhibitions of the Society of French Artists at his new London gallery at 168 New Bond Street, under the management of Charles Deschamps.[2]
Eventually Durand-Ruel had exhibitions of Impressionism and other works (including the expatriot American painter James McNeil Whistler who lived in London), at his Paris, London and New York galleries.
Durand-Ruel had an intense rivalry with Parisian art dealer Georges Petit (1856-1920).
