Paul Durand-Ruel took over his family's Paris business and spent fifty years turning a painting stock into a financial position. He met Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro in London during the Franco-Prussian War and began buying from them and from their circle in the early 1870s. The buying was not selective in the way a collector buys. He purchased in quantity, sometimes whole studios, and he did it on credit.
That is the part usually skipped. Buying deep in one artist means the dealer owns the supply, and owning the supply means the dealer sets the release schedule and defends the price. It also means near ruin whenever credit tightens, which happened to him more than once. He was close to bankruptcy in the mid 1870s and again in the mid 1880s.
The tools he built
The one artist exhibition was the first of them. In 1883 he ran a sequence of solo shows for Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Pissarro, which was an unusual format at a time when group hangs were the norm. A solo show forces the visitor to judge a body of work instead of one picture, and it gives the press a subject. Every gallery in the world now works this way.
He also printed catalogues with reproductions, kept a stock book, lent pictures to collectors so they could live with them before deciding, and paid monthly sums to artists against future work. Each of these looks unremarkable now because he made them standard. The monthly payments in particular changed what painters could attempt, since a guaranteed income lets an artist work in series rather than to commission.
Series were the natural product of this system. When Monet showed fifteen paintings of grain stacks at the Paris gallery in 1891, buyers were being offered variations on one motif rather than separate subjects, and they bought hard. A series makes a collector feel that owning one is incomplete. It is one of the most effective sales structures ever devised in the trade, and it was invented by a painter and a dealer working together.
- Buying whole studios gave the dealer control of supply and of the pace at which it reached the market
- Solo exhibitions moved the conversation from single pictures to bodies of work
- Illustrated catalogues gave buyers a document to keep and journalists something to reproduce
- Monthly payments to artists bought loyalty and made long series financially possible
- Lending pictures into private houses converted hesitation into ownership more reliably than argument
- A New York branch opened in 1888 and moved stock into a market with money and no fixed prejudices
America saved the business. The 1886 exhibition he sent to New York with the American Art Association put around three hundred works in front of a public that had no stake in the Paris quarrel about these painters. Sales were strong enough that he opened a New York branch two years later. Mary Cassatt then steered American collectors, the Havemeyers above all, toward the same material.
Why the model still governs
Almost every convention of the modern primary market traces back to this operation. Exclusive representation, the stipend, the solo show, the catalogue, the foreign branch and the practice of holding stock back all come from the same source. The impressionists get remembered for what they painted, and the market they entered was built by someone else. Both facts are true at the same time.
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.
Paul Durand-Ruel, from his memoirs
Read that line as a business statement rather than a sentimental one. He was describing a position held for thirty years against every signal the market sent him, and the only reason it paid was that he never had to liquidate at the bottom. Major impressionist holdings that passed through his hands are now at the Art Institute of Chicago among other museums.
