Portrait of the Artist as an Investment Opportunity

A corpulent banker with a gold-encrusted hat frowns at a group of ailing and maimed figures in a caricature by Albert Hahn. The protagonist of Emile Zola’s novel “L’Argent” (“Money”) — the manuscript of which is on display — is a powerful and scheming banker who destroys lives through stock-market speculation.

In the case of Durand-Ruel, the object of speculation was art, not stocks. He borrowed heavily from banks to invest in paintings, and nearly went bankrupt in the process. What saved him in the end was a relentless international expansion effort that boosted Impressionism’s appeal and made it a big hit with wealthy American collectors.

Durand-Ruel’s business model in the 1870s was to bulk-buy Impressionist works while they were mocked and scorned by the public — and therefore very affordable. One of his descendants estimated that Durand-Ruel bought some 1,500 works by Renoir, more than 1,000 by Monet, 800 by Pissarro, more than 400 by Degas, and 200 by Manet, according to the catalog of a 2015 exhibition at the National Gallery in London titled “Inventing Impressionism: Paul Durand-Ruel and the Modern Art Market.”

The son of an established Paris art dealer, Durand-Ruel took over his father’s gallery in 1865. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, he moved to London, met Monet and Pissarro, and decided “to take a punt on them,” said Christopher Riopelle, a co-curator of the National Gallery’s 2015 show.

Back in Paris, he also invested in Degas, Renoir and Sisley, and on a single visit to Manet’s studio bought 21 paintings, effectively controlling the artist’s nascent market.

In a stroke of marketing genius, he presented his artists not as individuals working in isolation but as members of a movement, so they would “prop up one another, but also come to be seen in the public eye as having some kind of collective weight,” Riopelle said. Presenting artists as a collective “becomes fairly standard practice from that moment on,” he said.