When his father died in 1865, Paul Durand-Ruel (1831–1922), aged thirty-four, became the director of his family’s art gallery in Paris. He had begun working with his father almost ten years earlier, gaining expertise and educating his eye. Although Durand-Ruel and his family were notably conservative—he came from several generations of staunch royalists and observant Catholics—the young man was not attracted, as might be expected, to official academic painting, but to more adventurous art. He developed what would be a lifelong passion for Eugène Delacroix when, at age twenty-four, he saw a large group of the artist’s important paintings at the Universal Exhibition of 1855. As an apprentice art dealer, Durand-Ruel also formed a taste for the work of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, the landscape painters of the Barbizon School, Gustave Courbet, and Honoré Daumier, none of them darlings of the establishment at the time; quite the contrary, they were generally taken to task, when they exhibited in the official Salons, for their indifference to the high-minded subject matter, sleek finish, and careful, antique-inspired drawing sanctioned by the Academy. When Durand-Ruel took charge of the family gallery, he showed the work of the artists he admired, bought it in quantity, and, by the end of the 1860s, began to gain support for it from collectors.

In September 1870, the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War prompted Durand-Ruel, like many prudent Parisians, to flee to London with his wife and growing family. There, he showed the work of French artists in