Paul Durand-Ruel. Gambling on Impressionism. Manet, Monet, Renoir...

"I come to my great crime, the one that overshadows all the others. For a long time I have been purchasing and praising to the sky works by some highly original and highly knowledgeable painters, several of whom are geniuses, and I intend to have art lovers accept them”, wrote Paul Durand-Ruel in 1885 with reference to the likes of Degas, Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Pissarro.
Since the early 1870s, the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel had been giving his backing to these then extremely controversial artists, inventing new methods to promote and disseminate their works. With a rich display of eighty paintings, and founded on unpublished research into the gallery archives, this exhibition will retrace the adventure of an innovative, committed dealer who insured the triumph of Impressionism in the early twentieth century.