T h e I m p r e ssi o n is t S a l e o f 1875
96 Claude Monet at His Easel, 1875 Second Impressionist exhibition, 1876 Oil on canvas, 33 × 23⅝ in. (84 × 60 cm) Musée d’Orsay, Paris
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Renoir
For Renoir, the last significant event of 1874 was the death of his father, Léonard Renoir, on December 22, 1874, at the age of seventy-five. Living on his small capital, he resided in Louveciennes, on the rue des Voisins. Renoir and his younger brother Edmond, who were both present, informed the local authorities of his death. The painter left a beautiful portrait of his father; dated 1869, it shows a severe man whose features are consistent with the brief description transmitted to us by Jean Renoir.14
Doubtless disappointed by the inefficacy of group exhibitions in finding buyers, Renoir, Monet, Sisley, and Berthe Morisot decided to organize an auction of their work, which took place at Hôtel Drouot on March 24, 1875. It was rare for living artists to resort to such a practice, usually the province of estate sales (for example, the Corot and Millet sales, which also took place in 1875), but the previous year Charles-François Daubigny had organized a successful auction. Furthermore, Degas, Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley had seen their works attain good prices at the voluntary sale of a private collection, that of Ernest Hoschedé, on January 13, 1874. Admittedly, close examination of the results reveals that the interventions of Durand-Ruel and the artists themselves, who bought back their own work to safeguard their prices, were decisive. But as Théodore Duret emphasized in a letter to Pissarro after the Hoschedé sale, such auctions were an important means of increasing artists’ notoriety, exposing them to a larger circle than the one for independent exhibitions.15 Vollard has Renoir say that the initiative for organizing the sale had been his,16 but this is by no means certain, given how the idea was in the air; it might have come from Durand-Ruel. As with the Hoschedé sale, the auctioneer was Charles Pillet, the “prince of bids” at the time, and the expert adviser was Durand-Ruel. Philippe Burty wrote a preface for the sale catalog. Shortly beforehand, Manet manifested his support by writing to the famous Albert Wolff, journalist-critic at Le Figaro, requesting that he announce it there.17 So everything was in place to make the occasion an event. On the day of the sale, however, chaos reigned at Hôtel Drouot: “There was a crowd in room 3. . . . Half the public was pro and the other half contra. You would not have believed the gales of laughter when certain canvases came up for bidding. A certain ‘Source’ was greeted with particular hilarity. . . . An argument very nearly broke out over it.”18 The painting in question was by Renoir, who bought it back at the sale; it was probably the Nymph by a Stream (1869–70) now in the National Gallery in London, a wan and angular female nude that, while painted with brio and boasting a distinctive placement of the figure within the frame, seems strange and aggressive even today.19 For Renoir, as for his colleagues, the experiment proved disastrous, bringing him only 2,251 francs for twenty paintings, the prices having ranged from 50 to 300 francs. Durand-Ruel paid the most for a Renoir, 300 francs for The Pont-Neuf (plate 78), and acquired one of