Story of a Passion:

French Impressionism and American Collectors

1880-1930

with Anne Catherine Abecassis

After the crisis of Impressionism of the early 1880s and important financial difficulties, the perseverance of gallery owner Paul Durand-Ruel finally paid off... and it was from America that the salvation of the Impressionists and their art dealer came.

American collectors had been visiting him in Paris since the 1860s, but it was in 1885 when Durand-Ruel received an invitation from James Sutton, director of the American Art Association, to exhibit in New York, all expenses paid, that things began to move. Durand-Ruel embarked from France with 300 paintings which he showed in a series of exhibitions in New York and other U.S. cities. New clients soon appeared: The Havemeyers from New York, close friends of Mary Cassatt, Bertha Palmer from Chicago (among the first to collect paintings by Claude Monet), Henry Clay Angell from Boston (the first American to buy an Impressionist painting), Duncan Phillips from Washington, Adolph E. Borie (whose bold taste impressed Durand-Ruel), William P. Wilstach, J. Gillingham Fell, and Henry Gibson from Philadelphia, among others.

“Without America," wrote Durand-Ruel in his memoir, "I would have been lost, ruined, after having bought so many Monets and Renoirs." And it is only thanks to this great American success that Europeans finally came to accept Impressionism!