Bypassing the Salon system, Durand-Ruel introduced a concept which today we take for granted, but at the time seemed far from likely to succeed. From 1870, he organised exhibitions in London and in his Paris gallery. In London he met Claude Monet, a temporary refugee, like himself, from the Franco-Prussian war. Monet would later introduce him to Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro and Edgar Degas. In spite of the fact that his exhibitions were spectacularly unsuccessful, Durand-Ruel continued to purchase massive amounts of works from ‘his’ artists, and to tirelessly promote them, to the point where he was continually on the brink of bankruptcy. It wasn’t until the success of an 1886 exhibition in New York that the buying public began to take his stable of artists seriously.

The artists corresponded with him regularly, relating their artistic journey and sharing with him both their successes and defeats. In 1888, around the time he painted ‘Jeune fille lisant’, featured in our June auction, Renoir wrote to Durand-Ruel: ‘I have taken up my old style again, never to abandon it – soft and light in handling’.

Claude Monet was, along with Renoir, Durand-Ruel’s most championed artist. His pastel ‘Waterloo Bridge’ was inspired initially by his stay in London in the early 1870s, the time of his historic meeting with the gallerist. Motived by the works of Turner and London’s quintessential fog, he vowed to return to the capital and paint a series of views. He finally managed to do so thirty years later, from which time dates the work in our June auction.

‘We would have died of hunger without Durand-Ruel, all we impressionists,’ said Monet. ‘We owe him everything.’

Not all of the artists Durand-Ruel represented became household names, but that did not discourage him from wholeheartedly supporting them, Federico Zandomeneghi was a political refugee from Venice who arrived in Paris in 1874. Durand-Ruel began showing his work in the 1890s, including two solo exhibitions. Today we can recognize the quiet genius in his work, such as ‘Au théâtre’ presented here, but Zandomeneghi never achieved significant recognition in his lifetime or for decades afterwards.

Gustave Loiseau, from the second generation of Impressionists, is another example of this. The two works shown here date from the early 1900s, a time when, thanks to Durand-Ruel, Loiseau was slowly gaining recognition and financial independence.

Although Monet and other artists sometimes grumbled about the political leanings and sales strategies of his patron (‘It took a reactionary to defend our paintings that the Salon people said were revolutionary,’ Monet wrote), he and the others recognised and were grateful for the dealer’s unfailing aid. ‘We would have died of hunger without Durand-Ruel, all we impressionists,’ said Monet. ‘We owe him everything.’