The only thing that matters when you buy your next French Impressionist – other than the price – is whether it pleases you and how it fits into your collection.
The painter’s political opinions should be irrelevant.
However, if you are human, you may be curious anyway. The Impressionists lived at the time of the Dreyfus affair, which tore France apart in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer from Alsace, was wrongly accused and convicted, on flimsy evidence, of having betrayed military secrets to the Germans. Right-wing anti-Semites and royalists were on the side of the accusers; republican democrats, like the writer Emile Zola, the author of J’accuse, backed him.
Edouard Manet, Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley were pro-Dreyfus and friends of Zola. So was Camille Pissaro who was Jewish, born in St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. He had come to Paris at the age of twelve.
Cézanne and Zola had been life-long friends but their friendship had cooled before the Dreyfus affair when Zola’s novel l’Oeuvre, took a critical view of the early history of the Impressionists, including Cézanne. This may have been one reason why Cézanne never backed the Dreyfus cause.
Strongly anti-Dreyfus were the conservative anti-Semites Edgar Dégas and Auguste Renoir.
Renoir wrote about Jews:
“They come to France to make money but the moment a fight is on they hide behind the first tree…. Every country chases them out – there is a reason for that and we must not allow them to occupy such a position in France.”
In 1888, i.e., before the Dreyfus affair, Renoir had protested against showing his work with Pissaro’s, a painter whose work he had always greatly admired. He maintained that “to exhibit with the Jew Pissaro means revolution.”
It is surely no coincidence that, in his films, Renoir’s son, the renowned director Jean Renoir, made the need to fight anti-Semitism one of his frequent themes.
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
I knew that Pissaro was Jewish. In fact I remember the house where he was born in St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. But I did NOT know that Renoir was an anti-Semite. Nor Degas. Does that mean I should not look at the many ballet dancers he painted ? I expect to see some of the Ring performances here….Do you approve or object. RK
To lovers of art the politics of the artist should be irrelevant. Enjoy the ballet dancers and the plump pink girls as before,
And of course you should go to the Ring.
I have seen all four parts done by the Canadian Opera Company, but not in the same season.
I have just finished reading The Hare with Amber Eyes, a haunting retracing of one family’s history, by Edmund De Waal. In the 1870′s Paris, Charles Ephrussi, one of the scions of a brillian Jewish family, a literate, generous man, a patron of the Impressionistes, a friend, lived in his glowing apartment with their art on his walls… Renoir was one who benefited from his friendship. In pique (as Charle’s interest changed, I think) Renoiir turned on his friend and patron – and as the Drufus affair tore apart France, such betrayals laid the path for the Gestapo to knock on doors sixty years later. How does one balance understanding that an artist is wonderful, creates such beauty, and still know that this artist bought into all the ignorance and stereotypes of the time? How do you forgive or excuse someone who ate his patron’s food, benefited from his patronage – then denigrates him as a Jew corrupting France…In both Austria and France, Jews had finally been granted the right to citizenship, to free rights to practice professions – they could be free to live and participate as citizens In each country, they contributed – lawyers, writers, artists, professors, bankers musicians, doctors – the bigoted, the ignorant and the outright covetous waited to bring them down. And they did.
By pure coincidence I just finished reading the book. I agree: it is splendid – I don’t know what I enjoyed more: the Parisian or the Viennese sections, (I also liked the Odessa chapter – I have always wanted to go there…..) I was less interested in the Japanese elements, which is m y fault. I admit I never heard of the family before….
Eric Koch
First – I am sorry I posted quickly without catching my misspelling of Dreyfus. I think the sorrow of that injustice still runs like an aching thread through late 19th and early 20th century events and history.
I liked the description of Odessa as well. It made me want to visit the city and see its port…