Discovering Impressionism: The Life of Paul Durand-Ruel

This account of the life of Paul Durand-Ruel, a renowned dealer in Impressionist paintings, is not so much a biography as a breezy, rambling account of the French art world in the second half of the 19th century, with Durand-Ruel as a focal point that never quite comes into focus--despite the fact that Assouline claims an almost queasy level of intimacy with his subject. He seems to be stretching the bounds of available evidence when he speculates, for example, that ""Paul felt himself secretly ... stronger"" than other art dealers because he grew up among artists and, thus, ""absorbed painting with his mother's milk."" Much of his narrative is related with the perfunctory storytelling and cheap emotions of a made-for-TV movie. When Durand-Ruel's sister dies, Assouline declares that the dealer ""lost the person who had been his guide and support for as long as he could remember""--never mind that this sister has been scarcely spoken of before and is never mentioned again. Even when the book enters the engrossing territory of the rise of Impressionism as a movement--which Assouline chronicles with lengthy quotations from scandalized art critics of the period--the narrative stalls out with bathetic generalizations: e.g., ""We can only make deductions from the clues that exist, since we are not party to secrets, swept into wretched little piles or raised to the height of pyramids, that sometimes remain inviolate for a whole lifetime."" To his credit, Assouline devotes a fair amount of space to one of the most absorbing mysteries of Durand-Ruel's life--namely, how the art dealer could be at once an anti-Semitic monarchist and a proponent of progressive art--but his discussion characteristically loses focus and meanders away without coming to any conclusions. This is a sentimental and poorly organized tour of what should be fascinating cultural terrain.