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in tissue paper decorated with prints of Japanese art, and it was from these sheets of tissue paper that the Impressionists were inspired to adopt several Eastern techniques in their own works. Japanese prints became all the rage then in Paris. Not only Van Gogh but also Manet, Monet, Degas, and Toulouse-Lautrec—who signed his works with a stamp bearing the initials TL, borrowed from the Japanese tradition of hanko, seals of stone, horn, or wood used in lieu of signatures on personal and business documents—experimented with foreshortening and a flattening of figures portrayed in their canvases, borrowing from the Japanese style. In such works as Portrait of Émile Zola by Degas (in the Musée d’Orsay), a Japanese screen and prints can be seen in the background of the seated Zola.

This piece also tells of how Tanguy’s modest color-grinder’s shop became a shrine of sorts of Impressionist and Post-impressionist painting.

HENRI PERRUCHOT was the author of many works on nineteenth-century painters, including Cézanne, Gauguin, Manet, Rousseau, Renoir, and Seurat, and contributed numerous essays to art publications. This piece originally appeared in the distinctive French art review L’Oeil, and later, for the first time in English, in Aspects of Modern Art: The Selective Eye III (Reynal & Company, 1957).

ALL WITNESSES ARE agreed on the subject of “le père Tanguy.” He played a preponderant role in the dazzling renewal of French painting at the end of the nineteenth century. Just after he died Octave Mirbeau said of him that “the story of his humble and upright life is inseparable from the history of the Impressionist group … and when that history comes to be written, Tanguy will have his place in it.” He couldn’t have been more right. Maurice Denis once said that his little shop in the rue Clauzel was the “origin of the great gust of fresh air that blew new life into French art in and around the year 1890”; and Émile Bernard would have it that “the so-called Pont Aven school would be more accurately named the Rue Clauzel school.”

Julien-François Tanguy was a Breton. He was born on June 28, 1825, half a dozen miles from Saint-Brieuc, in a village in the commune of Plédran, where his father was a weaver. The fifth child of a very poor, indeed almost penniless family, he went to Saint-Brieuc while still very young, and began life as a plasterer. In 1855, when he was thirty, he married a charcutière, abandoned his former trade, and helped his wife to market her ham and sausages. Whether he disliked being a pork butcher, or whether they just couldn’t make a go of it, is not known: but in any case, in 1860, he and his wife, and the little daughter who had been born to them meanwhile, made off to Paris. There, Tanguy was employed by the Compagnie de l’Ouest until in 1865 he found work as a color-grinder with the firm of Édouard in the rue Clauzel, which at that time had a great reputation among artists. Soon after this he set up on his own, prepared his own colors, and hawked them himself in those parts of France which were becoming popular among open-air painters. So it was that he came to know Pissarro, Manet, Renoir, Monet, Cézanne—all of them then more or less unknown—at Barbizon, or Ecouen, or Argenteuil, or Sarcelles…

Unfortunately the war of 1870 interrupted all this and embroiled “Papa Tanguy” in a sequence of catastrophic adventures. What happened exactly is still a little obscure, but it’s beyond question that at the time of the Commune Tanguy was one of the Fédérés. He was taken prisoner, sent to Satory, court-martialled and found guilty. He was sent to Brest, and there rotted until one of his fellow Bretons, the academic painter Jobbé-Duval, who was a member of the Paris Conseil Municipal, managed to get him a pardon.

He was back in Paris in 1873, or thereabouts, and reverted to color-grinding. As the firm of Édouard had just left the rue Clauzel he seized the opportunity of opening a shop in that very street, at no. 14.

The painters whom Papa Tanguy had known before the war, and who at once gave him their custom,