The Impressionist Circle, Before and After the Dreyfus Affair

Batsheva Goldman-Ida

Degas—I don’t want any more of you! Model—But, Mr. Degas, you have always told me how well I pose! Degas—Yes, but you are a Protestant, and the Protestants and the Jews walk hand in hand in the Dreyfus Affair!1 This is how art dealer Ambroise Vollard (1866–1939) chose to begin his tale of the irascible Edgar Degas (1834–1917)—with the emphasis on an aspect of Degas’s personality that crossed over to the racist and antisemitic. What had happened to the camaraderie of the Impressionist circle? How did the Impressionist circle begin, who were its members, and what was their status in 1894 when Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935) was arrested for treason? What had changed in their interpersonal relation- ships after they no longer exhibited together in the Impressionist salons? Did their religious denominations come to influence their decision to publicly support or protest Dreyfus’s innocence? At its inception in the early 1870s, the group, whose leading artists were Édouard Manet (1832–1863), Claude Monet (1840–1926), Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) and Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), tended to ally politically with the more progressive republican outlook. However, the main interaction between these dispa- rate artists was intense and engaged repartee regarding their new direc- tion in art.2 Typical are the words of Monet, discussing a meeting of the group at the Café Guerbois in Paris:

1 Ambroise Vollard, Degas (Paris: Les Editions G. Cres et cie, 1924), 1–2; see also entry of 3 February 1919, René Gimpel, Diary of an Art Dealer, 1918–1939, translated by John Rosenberg (New York, 1987), 89–90, quoted in Philip Nord, “The New Painting and the Dreyfus Affair,” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, vol. 24, no. 1, Intellectuals and the Dreyfus Affair (Spring 1998): 120. 2 For example, Cézanne wrote to Pissarro from Aix on 24 June 1874: “My dear Pissarro, Thank you for having thought of me whilst I am so far away and for not being angry that I did not keep my promise to go and see you at Pontoise before my departure. Immediately after my arrival which took place on a Saturday evening I began to paint . . ., I should be happy if you could give me news of Mme. Pissarro after the birth, and if you could let 286 batsheva goldman-ida

It wasn’t until 1869 that I saw Manet again, but we became close friends at once, as soon as we met. He invited me to come and see him each evening in a Café in the Batignolles district where he and his friends met when the day’s work in the studio was over. There I met Fantin-Latour and Cézanne, Degas, who had just returned from a trip to Italy, the art critic Duranty, Émile Zola (1840–1902), who was then making his debut in literature, and several others as well. I myself brought along Sisley, Bazille and Renoir. Nothing could be more interesting than the talks we had, with their per- petual clashes of opinion. Your mind was held in suspense all the time, you spurred the others on to sincere disinterested inquiry and were spurred on yourself, you laid in a stock of enthusiasm that kept you going for weeks on end until you could give final form to the idea you had in mind. You always went home afterwards better steeled for the fray, with a new sense of pur- pose and a clearer head.3 Although Manet did not consider himself an “Impressionist” in the stylistic sense that artists like Monet and Pissarro did, where daubs of pure color were applied to capture the effect of light and the elements, he nonethe- less influenced the group’s aesthetic explorations. Firstly, with his bold statements on the preeminence of the canvas and breaking with natural- istic depiction towards what we might today call hyper-realism (such as in the daring Luncheon on the Grass (1862–1863) and Olympia (1863)), then in his rebellion against the conservative, academic salon. Manet’s involve- ment with the Impressionists was familial as well; the painter Berthe Mor- isot (1841–1895), who exhibited with the group, was married to his brother Eugène, who Degas chose to portray in a casual stance, reflecting their friendship (Figure 9.1). Manet also shared the Impressionists’ commitment to the depiction of the moment. Though Monet’s painting, Impression, soleil levant (sunrise), (shown at the first Impressionist exhibit in 1874), is thought to have led to the term “Impressionism,” it was quite a bit earlier, in 1870, that Théodore Duret said of Manet, “He brings back from the vision he casts on things an impression truly his own. . . . Everything is summed up, in his eyes, in

me know whether there are fresh recruits at the Societé co-op.’’ [Societé Anonyme des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, whose first exhibition had just closed; Cézanne had exhibited several pictures there.] Ever yours Paul Cézanne.” Paul Cézanne, Letters, edited by John Rewald, translated from the French by Maguerite Kay (London: Bruno Cassirer, 1941), 96–98. 3 François Thiébault-Sisson, “Claude Monet, An Interview,” Le Temps (27 November 1900), quoted in Ian Dunlop, Degas (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), 89–90.