It is the story of a “coalman”, as Monet called it, who adored snow landscapes. Industrialist François Depeaux played a key role in the rise of the Impressionists. With its luminous collection, it is for the first time the subject of an exhibition, in Rouen.
“He is someone who, through his entrepreneurial know-how, established Impressionism among the great values of his time”, by buying a lot, supporting prices, then by donations, explains Sylvain Amic, co-curator of “François Depeaux, the man with 600 paintings”.
From “Moret at sunset” by Alfred Sisley on loan from the Cincinnati art museum (United States) to “Effet de neige, rue à Argenteuil” by Claude Monet, from Geneva, the exhibition is at the Musée des Beaux -arts (MBA) from Rouen, until November 15, nearly 70 paintings (thirteen of which have crossed borders despite the Covid-19). Among them nine Monet, 20 Sisley alongside Renoir, Pissaro, Caillebotte, Toulouse-Lautrec.
Their luminosity contrasts with the activity which allowed François Depeaux to finance them, coal. His company landed on a Rouen island in the Seine the ore imported from Wales to crush it there. “You can imagine the dust it gave off, this island was black,” notes Mr. Amic.
However “François Depeaux loves landscapes, snow” in particular, continues the director of the MBA in Rouen.
The “coal magnate” was born in 1853 into a family of industrialists, some twenty years before the birth of Impressionism.
Under his leadership, the family company will experience “dazzling development”. Financial ease acquired, he became a “compulsive” buyer of impressionist paintings, from 1884. “He threw himself into this activity, just as he threw himself into the coal trade”, summarizes Mr. Amic.
At the time, many impressionist paintings started out for a few hundred francs, while academic painters sold theirs for tens of thousands of francs.
– a Norman patriotism –
The “merchant, shipowner, mine owner” first bought a Sisley, which would remain his favorite. “It is in my opinion, certainly the one whose painting contains the most poetry”, wrote the industrialist in 1909, fifteen years after having accommodated the Briton.
In 1894, François Depeaux was the first to acquire one of Monet’s cathedrals, then the only impressionist whose prices were high. “Monet says + everyone is afraid of my prices except Depeaux +”, says Mr. Amic. The industrialist is omnipresent during the campaign of cathedrals, to the point of irritating the painter. But the “coalman”, as Monet describes it in a letter to his wife, struggles: he finds a new workshop, a light reflector or a screen. The best known of the Impressionists therefore treats it with the requisite consideration.
In total, 600 paintings will have been the property of François Depeaux including 60 Sisley and 20 Monet. The industrialist strives in the passage to “implant the impressionist aesthetic in the United Kingdom”. He organized an exhibition of 150 of his paintings in Wales, with a catalog translated into English.
But what motivates this man from a family without collections? “There is a form of patriotism. He is very attached to Normandy. He likes it and in addition there is business to do. And that allows him to frequent an environment which is not that of the industrialists”, answers Mr. Amic.
In 1906, a heated divorce forced this lover of pleasure and horses to sell 250 paintings, which risked plunging the price of the Impressionists. It is finally a “triumph”: François Depeaux manages to buy 53 of them. He will donate them in 1909 to the Rouen MBA, a long-standing project, “decisive at a time when in France, one does not see impressionism “, or little and in Paris, underlines the chief curator.
It is one of the three gifts of “earliest” impressionist paintings.
But the First World War and its embargo on strategic raw materials soon put an end to the flourishing trade of François Depeaux, which died out in 1920.
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