The man who midwifed impressionism

In 1870, as war smoldered between France and Prussia, art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel made his way from Paris to London to escape the intensifying hostilities.

There, the 39-year-old gallery owner met his future: two other temporary exiles, painters Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, progenitors of what was to become known as impressionism.

Impressionism became the dealer's enduring passion and a defining element of Western art. On June 24, "Discovering the Impressionists: Paul Durand-Ruel and the New Painting" opens at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it will run through Sept. 13, its only U.S. stop.

This extraordinary exhibition brings together 95 paintings that passed through Durand-Ruel's gallery - 95 paintings that stand in for the thousands more he purchased, and for the revolution this prescient, persistent man midwifed for a skeptical French elite and, ultimately, for a curious and enthusiastic receptive America.

The paintings in "Discovering the Impressionists" come from all over the world (the exhibition has been seen at London's National Gallery and the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris), and include many undeniable masterpieces.

Mary Cassatt's The Child's Bath (1893), Édouard Manet's The Battle of the USS Kearsarge and the CSS Alabama (1864), Monet's Poplars (1891), Pissarro's Lock at Pontoise (1872), and Renoir's Dance at Bougival (1883) and his portrait of Durand-Ruel (1910) are all on display, each illustrative of a different moment in the evolution of the movement.

This is impressionism with a story to tell - the story of its own birth and proliferation, largely impelled by a bourgeois French art dealer with patience, loyalty, and an adventuresome eye.

Philadelphia collectors, particularly the Cassatt family and others connected to the Pennsylvania Railroad, were hugely important in establishing both Durand-Ruel and the then-radical artists he so passionately promoted.

"Do not think the Americans are savages," he wrote to the painter Henri Fantin-Latour in 1886. "On the contrary, they are less ignorant, less close-minded than our French collectors."

Durand-Ruel had inherited his gallery from his parents in 1865, and virtually from the beginning, Philadelphians were important clients.

"In 1866, Adolph Borie, Philadelphia merchant, comes in the doors of the Paris gallery and starts buying works by Delacroix and Courbet and Corot, and then he invites his buddies from Philadelphia," said Jennifer A. Thompson, the museum's associate curator of European painting before 1900. She wrote the catalog essay on Durand-Ruel's American activities.

His "buddies" included businessman William Wilstach (whose collection was given to the Art Museum), industrialist J. Gillingham Fell, and distiller Henry Gibson (whose collection went to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts). Far from being shocked by the new paintings (a French critic had described one of Durand-Ruel's gallery shows as "an insane asylum"), these lions of Philadelphia's mercantile elite embraced the art, and the art dealer.

Durand-Ruel found Philadelphia business and Philadelphia taste laudably receptive: "The American public does not laugh," he once said. "It buys!"

Joseph Rishel, the museum's curator of European art before 1900, suggested these Philadelphians sensed - and appreciated - that the dealer's "first instinct was as a businessman." And they trusted his judgment. In his parents' gallery, Durand-Ruel had literally grown up surrounded by artists - Delacroix, Corot, Millet - who paved the way for Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Berthe Morisot, and Philadelphia's own Mary Cassatt, who at 22 moved to Paris to study painting in 1866.

Indeed, Cassatt played a special role in the evolution of taste in Philadelphia, and by extension, the entire country.

"In 1881, Mary Cassatt comes into his gallery in Paris and starts buying impressionist paintings," said Thompson. "Alexander Cassatt" - the artist's brother and first vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad - "had just added onto his house in Haverford. He needed paintings. So Mary decides to send him a Degas, a Monet, and a Pissarro, which she purchases through Durand-Ruel. Durand-Ruel manages the shipping of them to Philadelphia."

Katherine Cassatt gently warned her son the paintings might seem a bit "eccentric" in Philadelphia. But Alexander apparently saw more than eccentricity in the canvases.

"What happens is that, within a year or two, Mary Cassatt is being approached by other Philadelphians, other railroad executives, saying, 'I'd like to get some of those pictures, too.' So Frank Thompson, who became the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad . . . goes to Mary Cassatt and asks her to buy him some Monets. She tries to go directly to Monet to get the paintings, but Thompson decides he'd rather go directly to Durand-Ruel. . . . Frank and Ann Thompson trusted Durand-Ruel, they thought he was the easiest person for them to deal with. And [ultimately] they had a collection of about 20 works, a good portion of them came to this museum. So one of our great Monet Poplars was purchased by them."

The magnitude of Durand-Ruel's enterprise and its critical importance to the spread of impressionism can't be overstated, Thompson said.

"He owned about 5,000 impressionist paintings," she said. "A thousand Monets, 1,500 Renoirs. Renoir painted only 3,000 pictures, so Durand-Ruel had over half his total output."

The Philadelphia Museum of Art, through bequests, has about 100 paintings that passed through the Paris gallery; 16 are in this show, and others are identified in other parts of the museum.

So great was Durand-Ruel's influence that even Albert C. Barnes, whose collection was built later than this exhibition's time frame, patronized the gallery. Thompson estimates that half the Barnes Foundation's Renoirs came in via Durand-Ruel, who died in 1922.

"Alexander Cassatt starts impressionist collecting in Philadelphia," Thompson said. "But then pretty quickly, [John G.] Johnson's there, then [William] Elkins. [George] Widener comes in a little bit later. Carroll Tyson [Jr.] is a little bit later."

Far from being viewed as "eccentric," impressionism became the emblem of Philadelphia's fashionable elite.

"You see that in Chicago as well," said Thompson. "Bertha and Potter Palmer go in for the impressionists, and the Ryersons and Hutchinsons and Kimballs and everyone else."

Mary Cassatt, as this exhibition makes clear, was key to Durand-Ruel's success in the United States.

"She's working with a great number of Philadelphians through her brother, but she's also very good friends from her childhood years with Louisine Havemeyer, who was Louisine Elder before she married H.O. Havemeyer, the great sugar magnate," said Thompson. "They would form the largest impressionist collection in America, 60 percent or so purchased through Durand-Ruel. [It] is today at the Met. Mary also had friends in Boston . . . friends in Chicago, and in all these places, she's encouraging people to buy impressionist paintings.

"She's explicit with the fact that they will eventually find their way into American collections, that they will be given to museums," a legacy of Paul Durand-Ruel.

215-854-5594@SPSalisbury