Paul Durand Ruel

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Portrait by Renoir, 1910.

Paul Durand-Ruel (Paris, 1831 – Paris, 1922) was a French art dealer and gallery owner. He represented some of the 19th century French painters, especially those from the Barbizon School (Camille Corot, Charles-François Daubigny, Jules Dupré and Théodore Rousseau), and the Impressionists. In 1870, he met in London a number of French artists like Charles-François Daubigny, Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro. There he founded a gallery and started the "Annual Exhibitions of the Society of French Artists".

When Paul Durand-Ruel took over the business after his father's death in 1865, he adopted a more adventurous policy and started selling works by artists such as Eugene Delacroix, Corot, Daubigny and Gustave Courbet, and other painters of the Realist and Barbizon School. On the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War he moved to London at the same time establishing an agency in Brussels — and opened a gallery in New Bond Street, London. Introduced by Daubigny to Monet and Pissarro, he exhibited their work in London; and on his return to Paris they introduced him to their colleagues and friends. The Chronicle of Impressionism - Art Dealers

Durand-Ruel developed among American collectors this painting market. He opened a branch of his gallery in New York to better serve the American market.

"The American public does not laugh. It buys!"

His father was also an art dealer.

Pissarro’s friend, the painter Daubigny, recommended him to the art dealer Durand-Ruel, who did much for promotion of the Impressionists’ works; he would organize Pissarro’s exhibitions in Paris (1883) and New York (1886). [1] In this New York exhibition several works of Eugène Boudin were brought.

In 1872, Durand-Ruel began to buy Alfred Sisley’s paintings and to show them both at his gallery on the rue Laffitte in Paris and in London; this relationship would continue throughout Sisley’s career... In April 1876, the second Impressionist exhibition opened at Durand-Ruel’s gallery, 11 rue le Peletier, with eight of Sisley’s paintings on display. [2] He had exhibitions of Impressionist painters at his Paris and London galleries.


Here they are then, these artists who exhibit in the Durand-Ruel Gallery, linked to those who precede or accompany them. They are no longer isolated. One must not consider them as thrown upon their own devices. I have, therefore, less in view the present exhibition than the cause and the idea. What do they produce? What does the movement produce? And, consequently, what do these artists produce, wrestling with tradition body-to-body, admiring it and wanting to destroy it at the same time, realizing that it is great and powerful, and for that very reason attacking it?THE NEW PAINTING, 1876, Edmond Duranty.

External links

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Daughters of Paul Durand-Ruel.
Writer and art critic Edmond Duranty by Degas, 1879.