Monet exhibited a picture named “_Impression; soleil levant_.” In
derision Louis Leroy called an article on the exhibition in
“Charivari”[10] “_Exposition des Impressionists_,” and in spite of the
protests of the painters themselves the name stuck--just as the name
_Cubists_, derisively applied by Matisse, has stuck.
* * * * *
This exhibition, which marked an epoch in French art, was a failure so
far as immediate results went. The ridicule was such that the better
known artists, ashamed of being caught in the company of the new men,
“took good care not to run the risk a second time.”
The pictures were subjected to all sorts of petty insults, “such as the
placing of small coins upon the frames in derision, and jokes and
jibes.”
* * * * *
The next year the Impressionists held no exhibition, but under dire need
had a sale at the Hotel Drouot.
Claude Monet, Sisley, Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Cals, Cézanne, Degas,
Guillaumin, de Nittis, and Pissarro were represented. There were
some seventy pictures. The pictures were disliked and for some
unknown reason the artists were considered as hardened members of
the community. They only received laughable prices. Even the
attempt to carry out the auction-room trick of having friends bid
up the prices was not carried out successfully and many of the
pictures were bid in by the penniless friends in this way, and
withdrawn. Including these mistakes and the real sales they
realized not much more than $2,000. In this sale of 1875, Renoir’s
“Avant le bain” brought $28; “La Source,” $22 (afterwards sold for
$14,000); “Une vue du Pont neuf” brought all of $60; Claude Monet’s
twenty pictures averaged from $40 to $60 each.
The writer was offered “Avant le bain” in 1894 for $1,200; it has since
sold for $25,000. In a recent letter from M. George Durand-Ruel he says:
All the fine works of the Masters of the Modern French School have
advanced very much in value. The “Portrait of the Charpentier
Family,” which is now in the Metropolitan Museum, was ordered from
Renoir for three hundred francs; “La Source,” also by Renoir, was
sold in a sale in 1878 for 110 francs. It has been since bought by
the Prince de Wagram for 75,000 francs, and would be worth today
double the amount. The “Port de Boulogne,” by Manet, was bought
from Manet by my father for 800 francs and sold to Faure, who later
on sold it to Comte de Camondo for 70,000 francs. It would be worth
today about 250,000 francs. “Le Déjeuner dans l’Atelier,” which my
father bought from Manet and which we had on exhibition at 389
Fifth Avenue in 1895, asking price at that time $7,000, was sold
afterwards to M. Pellerin and bought two years ago for the Munich
Museum for $60,000.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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