Identifier: manetfrenchimpre00dure (find matches)
Title: Manet and the French impressionists: Pissarro--Claude Monet--Sisley--Renoir--Berthe Morisot--Cézanne--Guillaumin
Year: 1910 (1910s)
Authors: Duret, Théodore, 1838-1927 Flitch, J. E. Crawford (John Ernest Crawford), tr
Subjects: Manet, Edouard, 1832-1883 Painting Impressionism (Art)
Publisher: Philadelphia : J. B. Lippincott company
Contributing Library: Harold B. Lee Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Brigham Young University

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s were lower than those that Pissarro andCezanne ever knew; in no case did their pictures realise lessthan forty francs. When Sisleys fortunes were at their lowest ebb, among thefew people who lent him assistance was a certain restaurant pro-prietor called Murer. Thrown upon his own resources whenquite young, lie had become apprentice to a pastry-cook. Lateron he acquired a business of his own. He kept a confectionersshop in the Boulevard Voltaire, to which he had added a restau-rant. He regarded his business, however, merely as an unpleasantnecessity, and hoped eventually to be quit of it. His tastes wereall for literature and art; in fact, afterwards, when he had retiredand was in easy circumstances, he both wrote novels and paintedpictures. While he was still a restaurant proprietor, he had cometo know the Impressionists through Guillaumin, the friend of hisearly days, when both lived at Moulins, his native town. Whenthe years of distress came upon the Impressionists, and the ques-
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SISLEY 155 tion of how to live became a pressing problem, Murer on cer-tain days provided them with free meals at his restaurant. Sisleyand Renoir were the two who availed themselves most readily ofthis accommodation. When the number of lunches and dinnersreached a certain limit, he took a picture in payment. He boughta certain number of others in addition, at the current rate; theprices appear exceedingly low to-day, but nobody at that time,with the exception of a few friends, was willing to pay them.Thus Murer was one of the first to recognise the merit of theImpressionists and to form a collection of their works; he wasalso one of those who helped them to live in this time of theirgreatest distress, while they were waiting for the advent ofbetter days. Sisleys letters reveal his state of mind during this period ofgeneral hostility and prolonged poverty. The limit of his ambi-tion was simply to find the means of obtaining 100 francs forhis pictures; this was the utmost they had fetc

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