Home›How to collect antique paintings›French Impressionist Portraits Beyond...
French Impressionist Portraits Beyond the Famous Names
Marcellin Desboutin sat for Degas and for Manet, and both paintings are famous. What almost nobody remembers is that Desboutin was a painter too, and that he portrayed half the circle that portrayed him.
That is the shape of Impressionist portraiture. A small group of Paris painters who painted each other, and around them a much larger group who painted everyone else, in oil on canvas, for clients who wanted a modern likeness rather than a Salon machine.
Swipe →
| One man, three positions in the same circle | ||
| Degas | Manet | Desboutin |
| painted Desboutin, in the café picture that scandalised London in 1876 | painted Desboutin too, standing, in a coat, looking like a man who had lost a fortune | painted almost everyone else in the circle, and is remembered as a sitter |
| The famous names are the ones who were painted. The field is much wider than that. | ||
Three things to look at
How to Recognise an Impressionist Portrait |
Swipe →
| Daylight, not studio light | The academic portrait lights the face from a fixed point and leaves the rest in shadow. An Impressionist portrait uses the light of the room, which means colour in the shadows and a background that is not simply brown. | |
| Visible handling | The stroke is left where it landed. On a good canvas the face is finished and the coat is not, because the painter stopped at the point where the likeness held rather than at the point where the work looked complete. | |
| Ordinary clothes | No orders, no drapery, no column. A coat, a hat, a shawl, whatever the sitter was wearing that afternoon. The clothes date the canvas as reliably as a wig dates an eighteenth-century portrait. |
Beyond the four names
Who Else Painted Portraits in These Years |
Thirty painters exhibited in the eight Impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886. Four of them are household names. The others kept working, kept exhibiting and kept taking portrait commissions, and their canvases are the ones that come to market.
Around them worked a much wider circle who never exhibited with the group at all but painted in the same rooms, in the same light, with the same loosened handling. Spanish and Belgian painters settled in Paris, Salon portraitists who modernised late in their careers, and the poster designers and illustrators who painted portraits between commissions.
That is the field a collector actually meets. Signed oil portraits of the 1880s and 1890s by trained professionals, painted in the manner the famous four made possible.
Three rules
Buying an Impressionist Portrait |
The signature is usually there. Unlike the Old Master field, these painters signed. A signed and sometimes dated canvas lets you place the work exactly, and our guide to reading signatures covers how to work with one.
Judge where the painter stopped. A good Impressionist portrait is finished exactly where it needs to be and nowhere else. A weak one is either laboured all over or abandoned before the face held.
Condition is simpler here. These canvases are a century old rather than three, so relining is less common and the paint is usually stable. What you look for is surface dirt and old varnish, which are reversible.
In public collections
Where to See Them |
Edgar Degas, In a Café, 1875-76, with Desboutin as the sitter. Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
Édouard Manet, The Artist, portrait of Marcellin Desboutin, 1875. Museu de Arte de São Paulo.
Berthe Morisot, portraits of her family. Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.
Impressionist portraiture across the movement. Musée d'Orsay, Paris, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
| → | The next questionAnd the same question for the landscapes?Thirty painters exhibited with the Impressionists. Four are famous. The others painted the same rivers. |
Sources. Musée d'Orsay, Musée Marmottan Monet, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museu de Arte de São Paulo.
