Art Eyewitness Review: Making the Met, 1870-2020

 

Making the Met, 1870-2020

   Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City   

August 29, 2020 - January 3, 2021

Reviewed by Ed Voves

After months of waiting, I am finally able to wish the Metropolitan Museum of Art a happy 150th birthday/anniversary. Back on February 24, I visited the Met for the opening of its newly-restored British Galleries. On that sunny, joyful day, I fully-expected to be sending the congratulations of Art Eyewitness to the Met in April when their festivities were scheduled to commence.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded on April 13,1870. To honor this historic event, staff members of the Metropolitan Museum were putting the final touches on "Met 150" when I visited in February. I could see them at work behind screens and partitions, readying the first of a sensational series of celebratory events and special exhibitions, notably Making the Met, 1870-2020.

Visitors viewing 'George Washington Crossing the Delaware' by Emanuel Leutze, 1910.  ©The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

A jaw-dropping logo/image for Making the Met, 1870-2020, a composite of the 1910 photo (above) and a 2020 gallery view, was already posted on the Met's website. I could hardly restrain myself. In anticipation, I pre-ordered a copy of the exhibit catalog, something I rarely do.

On March 13, 2020, Met 150 was cast into limbo by the Covid-19 Pandemic quarantine. Weeks turned into months. The Met seemed cheated of a well-deserved opportunity to observe and enjoy its sesquicentennial.

I am not, usually, a superstitious person. Yet, after thinking about the date when the decision to create the Met was made, I found myself wondering if April 13, 1870 had been a Friday. Had the Met been "jinxed" on the day it was born?

April 13, 1870, I am glad to relate, was a Wednesday. Bad luck is not going to stop the Metropolitan Museum of Art!

And now, the Met has reopened its doors. HAPPY 150th to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And many, many more!!

Gallery view of Making the Met, 1870-2020 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. ©The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Making the Met, 1870-2020 is now open to visitors - social distancing, please - with displays of approximately three hundred of the Met's most important paintings, sculptures, works-on-paper, exquisite pieces of jewelry, musical instruments and works from the decorative arts. These have been chosen, not only for their beauty or level of artistry, but also to document the timeline of the Met's development over the century and a half since April 13, 1870.

There are many old favorites on view in the exhibition, but one of the highlighted paintings has taken on a special significance, ironically so. This is Anthony van Dyck's Saint Rosalie Interceding for the Plague-stricken of Palermo. 

Anthony van Dyck, Saint Rosalie Interceding for the Plague-stricken of Palermo, 1624. ©The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

This early van Dyck was painted in 1624, when the young Flemish painter was visiting Palermo. The Sicilian city was suffering from an outbreak of the Plague. The discovery of the tomb of the medieval Saint Rosalie was credited with stopping the spread of disease and requests for paintings of the miracle-working saint were quick in coming. Van Dyck painted this evocative masterpiece for an appreciative Sicilian patron.

Van Dyck's Saint Rosalie was among the very first major works of art purchased for the Met. So important was this van Dyck that it was depicted in the charming painting (shown below) by Frank Waller, Interior View of the Metropolitan Museum of Art when in Fourteenth Street, 1881. 

When it was added to the Met's collection, with the accession number 71.41, van Dyck's Saint Rosalie was hailed as a Flemish painting. The early donors and museum staff of the Met were much in favor of acquiring works of art which recalled the Dutch founders of New York back in 1625. Little could they have envisioned the significance of this painting for New Yorkers in 2020.

Frank Waller, Interior View of the Metropolitan Museum of Art when in Fourteenth Street, 1881. ©The Metropolitan Museum of Art, N.Y.

It was over a decade before the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened the doors of its historic Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street main building. Initially, in 1872, the Met's fledgling collection was showcased in a leased townhouse, located at 681 Fifth Ave, between Fifty-Third and Fifty-Fourth streets.

Just over a year later, in March 1873, the Met shifted its operations to a more suitable site, the Douglas Mansion, Fourteenth Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. Then, on March 30, 1880, the Met moved uptown to its new, permanent home, designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould.

Exterior View of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Flag Day, 1916. 

©The Metropolitan Museum of Art, N.Y.

There is no need to continue here with a breathless overview of the Met's first century and a half. The companion book to the Making the Met exhibition does an outstanding job presenting the story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The team of Met writers, led by Andrea Bayer and Laura Corey, demonstrate a sure grasp of the timeline of the museum's history and the overarching social themes of each era of the Met's development.

A few salient events and protagonists in the Metropolitan Museum of Art saga do require very-honorable mention. As noted above, the early decades of collecting were marked by an enthusiasm for Dutch and Flemish art from the seventeenth century. When railroad magnate, Collis P. Huntingdon, donated Vermeer's Young Woman with a Lute (ca. 1662-1663) in 1900, the New York press applauded and museum goers were delighted.

Johannes Vermeer, Young Woman with a Lute (ca. 1662-1663)

 ©The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The mid-nineteenth century discovery of Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) was linked to a renewed appreciation of Dutch artists other than Rembrandt. The French art critic, Theophile Thoré, led the way, extolling Vermeer and Frans Hals for their brilliant use of light and unconventional brush work. Young painters, soon to be called the Impressionists, embraced these Dutch masters. So too did the officials at the Louvre - while spurning the Impressionists.

The curators at the just-opened Metropolitan followed the lead of their French colleagues. Initially, they paid little heed to Renoir, Monet, Pissaro and Degas. It was the purchases by American art patrons which saved the Impressionists and their principal dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, from ruin. And it was a pair of New York art lovers who insured that the Met's collection would eventually include some of the greatest works by the Impressionist painters. 

There are so many dedicated and generous art patrons who have contributed works of art and financial endowments, making the Met the great institution it is today. In a class by themselves, however, are Henry and Louisine Havemeyer.

According to the narrative of Making the Met, Henry Osborne Havemeyer (1847-1907) received a misdirected fund-raising letter from the Metropolitan's first director, Luigi Palma di Cesnola. Instead of being angered, H.O. Havemeyer sent a check for $1000, then a princely sum, and asked to be added to the donor list.

Havemeyer, who would go on to found the American Sugar Refinery Company in 1891, married Louisine Waldron Elder in 1883. A passionate art enthusiast, Louisine Havemeyer was a close friend of artist Mary Cassatt. With the sage advice of Cassatt, the Havemeyers began purchasing Impressionist paintings. These included a huge number of works by Cassatt's mentor, Edgar Degas, and Claude Monet's 1869 masterpiece, La Grenouillère. This work, along with Renoir's version of the same scene, can lay claim to being the first Impressionist painting, created five years before the name for the movement was proclaimed.

Claude Monet, La Grenouillère, 1869  

©The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

H.O. Havemeyer's taste was very eclectic and he was a more impulsive buyer than his wife. Perhaps surprisingly for a Gilded Age tycoon, he favored hand-blown glass vases by Louis Comfort Tiffany and Japanese prints, including the now iconic The Great Wave off Kanagawa. 

         Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, 

        ca. 1830 -1831 ©The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Havemeyer collection is well represented in Making the Met. However, to get a real appreciation of the works which the Havemeyers bequeathed to the Met, a separate exhibition would be needed. In fact, the Met mounted such an exhibit in 1993, aptly titled A Splendid Legacy. An archival photo from the exhibit provides a sense of the quality and scale of the Havemeyer collection.

When Mrs. Havermeyer died in January 1929, the Met received a staggering bequest of 1,967 works of art, including two hundred masterpieces of French nineteenth century painting. Mr. Havermeyer's beloved Tiffany glass collection had already been bestowed upon the Met and the Havermeyer's children and grandchildren were to give further works of art. 

Gallery view of the Splendid Legacy exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

It's no exaggeration to compare the Havermeyer Collection at the Met to the treasures of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. Yet, Henry and Louisine Havemeyer did much more than amass a trove of world-class art. They set a moral tone in the American art world and in the United States at large. Their generous philanthropy stood in marked contrast to the "conspicuous consumption" of other Gilded Age aristocrats.

Writing to her children, later in life, Mrs. Havemeyer confided,"never forget how blessed you are and when an opportunity arises, try to equalize the sum of human happiness and share the sunshine you have inherited."

This socially-conscious attitude is reflected in the sense of mission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both in its day-to-day operations and in the Met's proactive role as a New York City museum and as one of the greatest cultural institutions of the United States. And never is the Met's "mission" better served than in times of crisis.

When the United States joined the struggle against Hitler's Reich, a number of Metropolitan staff members served in the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section (MFAA). The "Monuments Men" searched and saved many of the art treasures looted by the Nazis. Met 150 highlights the contributions of James Rorimer, the curator of the Metropolitan's medieval art collection at the Cloisters, who played an especially important role in the MFAA. Rorimer later became the Metropolitan's director from 1955 to 1966. 

  

U.S. Signal Corps. photo of Lt. James J. Rorimer (left), May 1945 

Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

                                                              

The famed "Monuments Men" detachment included several "Monuments Women." One of these courageous curators, Rose Valland, provided crucial assistance to James Rorimer. An art historian at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Valland remained in Paris during the Nazi occupation. Valland spoke German and was able, by listening to the conversation of Nazi officers, to keep a detailed record of the art works consigned for shipment to the Reich. When Rorimer reached Paris after D-Day, Valland passed this vital information to him. 

  

 Capt. Edith Standen (right) at the Central Collecting Point Wiesbaden

 Courtesy of the Archives of American Art

Also of note, Edith A. Standen, later curator of European tapestries at the Met, served as the temporary commanding officer of the Central Collecting Point in Wiesbaden, Germany. There, tens of thousands of works of art were sorted and cataloged prior to being restored to their owners. When the U.S. Army determined to send 202 German-owned paintings to the U.S. for "storage," Standen and thirty-six other MFAA officers signed the Wiesbaden Manifesto. They protested against "the removal for any reason of a part of the heritage of any nation even if that heritage may be interpreted as a prize of war."  

In 1948, the paintings were returned to Germany. This display of moral courage by Standen and the other Monuments "Men" is a rare event in history. It is, however, a deed in keeping with the Met's high standards as the caretaker of "5000 years of history." 

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2014) 

Gallery view of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

 I have been visiting The Metropolitan Museum of Art regularly since the late 1970's. From a fairly circumscribed interest in nineteenth century art, my awareness and appreciation of the totality of human achievement has expanded through the tremendous efforts of the Met's curators and the talented, dedicated staff who support them.

The Met has become a second home for me. It has been the site of so many happy, enlightening moments in my life, I can hardly begin to count!

 

 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1983. ©The Metropolitan Museum

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a place for nurturing the heart, as well as enjoying great art. What a blessing this incomparable institution is, for me and for art lovers from around the world!

Happy 150th to the Met!

***

Text: Copyright of Ed Voves. Original Photos: Anne Lloyd. All rights reserved  Images courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

Introductory Image: Exhibition logo/image for Making the Met, 1870-2020. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Visitors viewing 'George Washington Crossing the Delaware' by Emanuel Leutze, 1910.  ©The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Gallery view of Making the Met, 1870-2020 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. ©The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Anthony van Dyck (Flemish, 1599-1641)Saint Rosalie Interceding for the Plague-stricken of Palermo, 1624. Oil on Canvas: 39 1/4 x29 in. (99.7 x 73.7 cm): Metropolitan Museum of Art. Purchase, 1871. #71.41. ©The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Frank Waller, Interior View of the Metropolitan Museum of Art when in Fourteenth Street, 1881. Oil on Canvas: 24 x 20 in. (61 x 50.8 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art. Purchase, 1895. #95.29 © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Unknown Photographer. Exterior View of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Flag Day, 1916. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Johannes Vermeer, Young Woman with a Lute (ca.1662-1663) Oil on canvas: 20 1/4 x 18 in. (51.4 x 45.7 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bequest of Collis P. Huntington, 1900 #25.110.24  © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926) La Grenouillère, 1869. Oil on canvas:29 3/8 x 39 1/4 in. (74.6 x 99.7 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art. H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929. #29.100.112  © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Katsushika Hokusai (Japanese, 1760–1849) Under the Wave off Kanagawa, also known as The Great Wave, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, ca. 1830–32. Woodblock print; ink and color on paper: 10 1/8 x 14 15/16 in. (25.7 x 37.9 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art. H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929. #JP1847 ©The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Gallery view of Splendid Legacy: the Havemeyer Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, March 27 - June 20, 1993© The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 

Unknown photographer. First Lieutenant James J. Rorimer (left) and Sergeant Antonio T. Valin examine recovered objects. Neuschwanstein, Germany, May 1945. Photograph by U.S. Signal Corps, James Rorimer papers, National Gallery of Art. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Unknown photographer. Capt. Standen (NSA) & Lt. R. Lemaire (Belg.) holding a Rubens portrait; Wiesbaden, 1946. Photographic print : b&w,12 x 8 cm. Thomas Carr Howe papers, 1932-1984. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Digital ID: 16223

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2014) Gallery view of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

View of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1983. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Art Eyewitness Essay: Discovering Impressionism

Discovering Impressionism:

Paul Durand-Ruel, Theophile Thoré and the New Painting

By Ed Voves

It is impossible to predict what will be the most influential or most innovative art exhibition for the coming year. It's a safe bet, however, that the big Impressionist exhibit honoring Paul Durand-Ruel will be in the running.

Paul Durand-Ruel (1831-1922) was the art impresario who discovered Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro while they were refugees in London during the War of 1870-71. Durand-Ruel went on to market the work of the "New Painters” until the once-derided Impressionists were a global art phenomenon. 

Over the course of his long career, Durand-Ruel bought and sold the work of the Impressionists. Often nobody else was doing so and early sales ventures were failures. Durand-Ruel came close to bankruptcy on several occasions. In 1886, the tide turned when a New York exhibition caught the attention of American art enthusiasts.

Dornac, Photograph of Paul Durand-Ruel in His Gallery, about 1910

“At last the Impressionist masters triumphed …," Durand-Ruel later declared. "My madness had been wisdom. To think that, had I passed away at sixty, I would have died debt-ridden and bankrupt, surrounded by a wealth of underrated treasures.”

Amazingly, this is the first museum exhibition to highlight the pivotal role of Durand-Ruel in the saga of Impressionism.

The Durand-Ruel exhibit is in its final weeks in Paris at the Musée du Luxembourg. Then Inventing Impressionism: Paul Durand-Ruel will appear at the National Gallery in London from March 4 to May 13, 2015. The exhibition travels to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, June 18 to September 13. The Philadelphia exhibit will be entitled Discovering Impressionism: Paul Durand-Ruel and the New Painting.

One of my favorite paintings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art appears in the exhibits: Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Portrait of Mademoiselle Legrand. The little girl, Adelphine Legrand, was eight years old when Renoir painted her. It was 1875, the year after the first Impressionist exhibition when profits were meager and criticism was harsh. Renoir needed the money that portrait painting offered.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Portrait of Mademoiselle Legrand, 1875 (detail)

Portrait of Mademoiselle Legrand is more than a wonderful work of art - though it certainly is that. This marvelous painting is a link back in time from the Impressionists to the Dutch Golden Age of the 1600's.

There are many reasons for the tremendous – if not immediate – impact of Impressionist paintings. Durand-Ruel's  business acumen and risk-taking courage are certainly primary factors. But I think there is another element to this success story, rooted in an earlier school of art that shared many of the same concerns and strengths of the Impressionists.

Old Master art of the seventeenth century was accorded the highest prestige by the Academic art establishment of the nineteenth century. Praise was heaped upon Rembrandt and Rubens and new techniques in painting were frowned upon.  

Yet, just a few years before Durand-Ruel began selling Impressionist works, the French art critic, Theophile Thoré, rediscovered the paintings of Jan Vermeer and Frans Hals. Thoré showed that these forgotten Dutch masters of genre and portraiture had explored themes and techniques that the Impressionists would shortly embrace.

Thoré (1807-1869) was a left-wing journalist whose newspaper was banned during the 1848 Revolution. He went into exile to Belgium after the liberal revolts failed. Thoré had already discovered the almost totally forgotten Vermeer on an earlier visit to Holland in 1842 and during his years in exile, 1849-1859, he continued researching the Dutch Golden Age. 

There were political reasons, as well as artistic ones, motivating Thoré. Holland was governed by a republican government during its Golden Age. Thoré, writing under the pseudonym of Willem Bürger, was able to skewer the despotic regime of Napoleon III by extolling the amazing cultural achievements of the Dutch Republic during the 1600s.

Thoré succeeded in rescuing Vermeer and Frans Hals from lingering under the shadow of Rembrandt. In 1869, the Louvre received a huge bequest of Dutch paintings collected by Louis La Caze, a doctor who shared Thoré's enthusiasm for Dutch painting. Hals' smiling Gypsy Girl was one of the major paintings of the bequest and is now an iconic work in the collection of the Louvre.

Sadly, Thoré died the same year as the La Caze bequest. The torch, however, had been passed. Many of the young painters who would form the Impressionist circle were left-wing in political temperament. These “New Painters” eagerly embraced the portraits of the Dutch middle and working class by Hals.

Frans Hals (1580-1666) impressed the artists of the Impressionist era with the spontaneity and simplicity of his technique. Hals was born in Antwerp but had fled the advance of the Spanish armies determined to crush Protestant dissent in the Low Countries. Hals’s immigrant status lends a certain degree of poignancy to the way that he chose the plain folk of Holland as the favorite subject of his art.

The source of Hals’s manner of painting is more of a mystery. The Baroque era valued minute attention to texture and detail. Hals, however,  paid little attention to either. Instead, he created a technique that used the effect of light to delineate the essential form and the inner character of his subject. Hals painted portraits to register from across a room – just as people are viewed in real life. It was a style all his own.

Hals brilliantly captured every possible emotion at one time or another on his canvases. From the smug arrogance of his famous (and misnamed) Laughing Cavalier in the Wallace Collection in London to the look of spiritual fervor on the face of St. John the Evangelist at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Hals evoked the entire spectrum of human feeling.

Frans Hals, Saint John the Evangelist, 1625 - 1628

Hals’ grasp of human nature has not passed without critical comment. Like 1950’s Cinemascope movies, his range is often said to be "wide but not deep." But if you look closely enough, especially at the children he painted, you will see real psychological insight.

Frans Hals, Saint John the Evangelist, detail

Has there ever been a better depiction of youthful character in the making than Hals’ painting, Boy Reading? This is thought to be a portrait of his son Nicolaes Hals (1628-1686), who later became an accomplished landscape painter. Boy Reading is a wonderful counterpart to Renoir’s Mademoiselle Legrand. Both paintings depict young people striving to be grown-up. Nicolaes and Adelphine, across the divide of two centuries, are shown growing into the persons they will become.

Hals, as befitted a Dutch painter of his sober-dressed countrymen, was accomplished in handling black paint. Nicolaes is in bathed in sunlight in Boy Reading and this meant the use of subtle gradations of black and gray color to convey the parts of his garments reflecting the light or residing in shadow. 

Frans Hals, Boy Reading, between 1597 and 1666

My wife successfully faced a similar challenge, a couple of years ago, when she painted three black-garbed figures emerging into sunlight. I learned from observation of her successful efforts that the level of skill needed to bring this task to fulfillment is very great.

Hals was so far ahead of his time in technique that he could train no students to manipulate paint in the quick, fluid strokes that he used so brilliantly. He had to wait until the Impressionists to find worthy successors.

Does that mean that Hals was the first Impressionist? Was Hals the “inventor” of Impressionism?

Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet and Vincent van Gogh were vocal in their high regard for Hals. Each had a very different style and objections can be made to including them among the ranks of the Impressionists. Indeed all of the Impressionists were supreme individualists and there was no signature Impressionist style.

There was an affinity, however, between the Impressionists and the Dutch painters rediscovered by Thoré. A brief comparison between Hals and Renoir is worthy of consideration.

I think an instinctive comradeship existed between Renoir and Hals. Rather than a close study of Hals by Renoir, it was a case of two great portrait painters sharing insights across the centuries.

Between 1875 and 1890, Renoir was the leading Impressionist portrait painter. His style and achievements bear comparison with Hals, as can be seen with Mademoiselle Legrand. Many – but not all – of his portraits have the same austere, uncluttered backgrounds of Hals’s work. The essential character of Renoir’s protagonists make their presence felt in a crowded room just as they do in a work by Frans Hals.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Dance at Bougival, 1883

Frans Hals, Young Man and Woman in an Inn, 1623

Later, when rheumatoid arthritis began to grip Renoir’s body and a desire to explore eighteenth century classicism dominated his artistic goals, Renoir's career took a different turn. But In 1910, Renoir summoned up all his old skill to paint one last, magnificent portrait with echoes of the influence of Frans Hals. Significantly, the portrait was of Paul Durand-Ruel.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Portrait of Paul Durand-Ruel, 1910

Durand-Ruel was well aware of the social factors and influences at work in the world at large. It was a nineteenth century middle class world that Durand-Ruel had to coax and entice to buy Impressionist art.  This liberal, progressive society shared many affinities with the Dutch during their seventeenth century "Golden Age." It says a lot that Durand-Ruel found many of the most enthusiastic buyers for Impressionist art in the United States, which had embraced the Dutch Republic as one of its models during the 1800's.

Interestingly, one of the first French  patrons of Impressionist art was Victor Chocquet, who typified the middle class patrons of art of the Belle Epoque in France. The Oskar Reinhart Collection, located in Winterthur, Switzerland, is mounting an exhibition, Victor Chocquet, Art Collector and Friend of the Impressionists, set to run from  February 21 to June 7, 2015. This exhibit will make a fine counterpoint to the Durand-Ruel exhibitions.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Portrait of Victor Chocquet, 1876

A customs official, Victor Chocquet (1821-91) used his limited financial resources to purchase Impressionist paintings, including a matching pair of portraits of himself and his wife by Renoir. He was among the first art patrons to grasp the genius of Cezanne, whom he personally befriended. By the time of his death, Chocquet had amassed sixty paintings, of which thirty-five were by Cezanne. 

Chocquet's collection was impressive for an individual, but it could only make a small impact compared to Durand-Ruel's efforts. Between 1891 and 1922,  Durand-Ruel bought around twelve thousand Impressionist paintings, including more than one thousand by Monet. These he then offered for sale in his galleries and in special exhibits such as in 1905 at London's Grafton Galleries.  

“Without him”,  Monet said of Durand-Ruel, “we wouldn’t have survived.”

If there was an Impressionist “brand” then it was Durand-Ruel who "invented" it.  But the source of Impressionist success was the same as it had been in the Dutch Golden Age:  the market for art among the upwardly mobile middle class.  People like Victor Chocquet and the parents of Mademoiselle Legrand bought paintings that reflected their lives, their dreams, their achievements and their aspirations. 

Such is the foundation of all great art.

***
Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved 

Introductory Image:                                                                                                         Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919) Portrait of Mademoiselle Legrand, Oil on canvas, 32 x 23 1/2 inches (81.3 x 59.7 cm), 1875. Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Henry P. McIlhenny Collection in memory of Frances P. McIlhenny, 1986, (1986-26-28)  Image: © The Philadelphia Museum of Art

Dornac (Paul François Arnold Cardon) (French,1859-1941) Photograph of Paul Durand-Ruel in His Gallery, about 1910. Archives Durand-Ruel. Image © Archives Durand-Ruel © Durand-Ruel & Cie

Frans Hals (Dutch, 1582/83–1666) Saint John the Evangelist, Oil on canvas,  27 9/16 x 21 5/8 in.,1625 - 1628, J. Paul Getty Museum (97.PA.48) Image: © The J. Paul Getty Trust

Frans Hals (Dutch,  1582/83–1666) Boy Reading,  Oil on canvas, 29.9 × 24.8 in., (76 × 63 cm), between 1597 and 1666. The Oskar Reinhart Collection ‘Am Römerholz’ in Winterthur,Switzerland. Image provided by the Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002, and Wikipedia Images.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919) Dance at Bougival, Oil on canvas,                   71 5/8 x 38 5/8 in. (181.9 x 98.1 cm), 1883. Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Picture Fund purchase,(37.375 )Image: © The Boston Museum of Fine Arts  

Frans Hals (Dutch, 1582/83–1666) Young Man and Woman in an Inn ("Yonker Ramp and His Sweetheart"), Oil on canvas, 41 1/2 x 31 1/4 in. (105.4 x 79.4 cm), 1623. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913, (14.40.602) Image: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919) Portrait of Paul Durand-Ruel, Oil on Canvas,  25.6 × 21.7 inches (65 × 55 cm), 1910. Private collection. Image © Archives Durand-Ruel © Durand-Ruel & Cie

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919) Portrait of Victor Chocquet, Oil on Canvas, 46 x 36 cm,  1876. The Oskar Reinhart Collection ‘Am Römerholz’ in Winterthur,Switzerland. Image provided  by The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002 and Wikipedia Images.