In 2019, this canvas by Monet made headline news: it was sold for 110 million dollars. A record for an impressionist canvas! But relations between impressionism and art market aren’t all that recent.

In order to understand, let’s go back a bit in time. Works can be sold by art dealers and at auctions. It’s what’s known as the art market. It develops in the 16^th century, in parallel with commissions placed by rich and powerful individuals and religious institutions.

In the 19^th century, when modern painting begins to emerge, the art market is at its height! And as we’re going to see, their respective evolutions are closely connected.

So how much did an impressionist painting cost at the time? Who were the patrons and art dealers involved with these artists ahead of their time? How did Monet get rich? We’ll be unpacking all that in this episode!

To start with, let’s go back to 1874 and the first impressionist exhibition. As we said, the artists are seeking to free themselves from Paris’ official Salon, which has sometimes arbitrarily refused to present their works.

But this year is also marked by an economic crisis: many collectors put their purchases on hold. That’s what encourages the future impressionists to take the plunge: they’re hoping to sell their works without a dealer or the Salon as intermediaries.

Unfortunately, their first commercial operation is a failure. Customers don’t fall over each other and the event’s financial performance is disastrous. This work by Berthe Morisot is one of the few to be sold in 1874!

So the following year, several artists decide to hold an auction in the hope of making a little money. But they don’t do any better: their canvases go for low prices…

Although the exhibition and the auction show no profit, several impressionist paintings (mainly landscapes) find takers in 1874 at more or less reasonable prices.

At the exhibition, three of the four landscape paintings are purchased for 1,000 francs each. A few audacious collectors take out their wallets, including the businessman Ernest Hoschedé, who acquires Monet’s soon to be famous Impression, Sunrise.

At the auction in 1875, canvases go for no more than a hundred or so francs. It’s Berthe Morisot who turns up trumps with her work Interior, sold for 480 francs!

In comparison:

• A primary school teacher earns 1,000 francs a year at the time.
• Ingres, an academic artist, sells his works at 50,000 francs apiece.

Yes, the impressionists are lucky: they can count on the unconditional support of an art dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel! He develops a formidable strategy for assisting and promoting his artists:

• Exclusivity: Durand-Ruel purchases batches of major works from his artists, sometimes their entire output. Such purchases provide the still largely unknown artists with a sort of “salary” and consequent security. He even goes as far as paying their rents directly!
• Promotion: he disseminates their creations via engravings, magazines and a variety of meticulously organised exhibitions.
• International expansion: he opens galleries in Brussels, London and New York, and sells to an international clientele.

And it works: by the beginning of the 20^th century, impressionist works are going for astronomical sums! As for Durand-Ruel, he’s become the model for the modern art dealer.

Claude Monet makes a lot of money from Durand-Ruel’s efforts. The proof:

In the 1870s, Monet sells his canvases for a few hundred francs. Although he’s not as poor as he was to start with, his situation is still precarious.

In 1912, his paintings earn him 369,000 francs, the equivalent of 12 million dollars today!

But not all the impressionists have the same good fortune. Although their careers take time to get going, Renoir and Degas end up making similar sums. However, Cézanne sells very few paintings, while Sisley dies in abject poverty in 1899.

Monet benefits from Durand-Ruel’s strategy… but he’s also very crafty on his own account!

From the 1890s onwards, he makes money by:

• Getting dealers to compete with each other. He terminates his exclusivity deal with Durand-Ruel and goes to work with the Georges Petit gallery, which has a more varied clientele.
• Setting his prices and negotiating high percentages on sales of his works.
• Painting series. He produces dozens of paintings on the same subject in order to study variations of light. Enough to meet the needs of all his collectors!

That’s not all: thanks to Durand-Ruel, Monet and his colleagues expand their clientele… by setting off to conquer America! The country’s new industrial tycoons are hungry for French art, enabling the artists to do good business with such patrons of the arts as Louisine Elder Havemeyer.

Two women artists also play a key role in this opening up to the world:

• Sarah Tyson Hallowell, curator and art advisor to wealthy families in Chicago.
• Mary Cassatt, an impressionist artist living in Paris, who places her colleagues’ paintings with her friends and relations living in Philadelphia and New York.

Mission accomplished: in 1895, there are already 300 of Monet’s canvases on the other side of the Atlantic!