Thodore Rousseau and the Rise of the Modern Art Market by Simon Kelly;

Author:Simon Kelly; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

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The Art Dealers: Adolphe Beugniet to Paul Durand-Ruel

The rise of a dealer network, challenging the traditional Salon system, was crucial to the emergence of the modern art market in France in the nineteenth century. There had been a community of dealers in eighteenth-century France. The space of Gersaint’s gallery, as pictured by Watteau, is perhaps the best-known example. Yet, this network was still relatively limited by the early nineteenth century. An overview of the Paris business directory, the Annuaire Général du Commerce, shows the rapid increase in numbers of art dealers by the middle of the century. There were twenty-three dealers listed in 1827.1 By the late 1850s, that number had more than quadrupled. Not only did dealer numbers increase but so too did their strategies become more ambitious. By the 1860s, the noted dealer Paul Durand-Ruel was using a wide range of approaches. Recent scholarship on Durand-Ruel’s career, building on the writing of Linda Whiteley, has highlighted the significance of his innovative methods in promoting not only the Impressionists but also what the dealer called the “beautiful School of 1830.”2 Among these were the monopolization of the artists in his stable, the consistent setting of sale records for their work at auction, the spectacular one-person retrospective, the artist biography to raise collector interest and further legitimize his artists’ work, and the promotion of work not only in France but through an international gallery network across Europe and America. All of these strategies anticipate modern dealing methods and Durand-Ruel was certainly a leading figure in developing them. Yet, he was not necessarily unique in his practices. The Belgian dealer Gustave Coûteaux, for example, explored some similar methods—notably monopolization of his artists—from the 1840s.3 The loss of the archives of other Parisian mid-nineteenth-century dealers has also deprived us of knowledge of the practices of many other of Durand-Ruel’s contemporaries.

Within this context of the increasing power of art dealers in the French art world, artists too developed strategies to express their own agency. They constructed networks of several dealers, playing off one against the other in order to achieve higher prices. They produced small- to mid-scale work consciously aimed at dealer galleries that were smaller than the grand spaces of the Salon. Such works also fitted well in gallery windows within a growing culture of display and spectacle in mid-century Paris. Artists also offered discounts in return for buying work in bulk. Eugène Delacroix sold pictures to an extensive network of Parisian dealers in the 1840s and 1850s.4 So too did Corot and Courbet.5 Artists did not generally produce work for a single dealer. Charles-François Daubigny sold his paintings to the very large number of thirty-eight different dealers.6 Théodore Rousseau, for his part, would come to immerse himself in the world of Parisian dealers during the prosperous years of the Second Empire.

Early Years

The young group of innovative landscape painters or “School of 1830” who emerged in Paris in the early 1830s succeeded in finding a network of dealer support. Dupré consistently sold

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