Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [222]
Madame Tanguy followed her husband’s advice and made what money she could from the canvases which were still in the shop. The sale was held at the Hôtel Drouot on June 2, 1894. It brought in 14,621 francs—not a bad total, in itself, especially for people like the Tanguys who had been poor all their lives. But in relation to the masterpieces which came under the hammer it was pitiably small. The only picture that got anything like a good price was a Monet, a view of Bordighera, which fetched 3,000 francs. Six Cézannes (five went to Vollard and one to Victor Chocquet) went for 902 francs in all: their individual prices varied between 92 and 215 francs, and the auctioneer actually complimented Vollard on his “recklessness” in bidding up to the latter figure! The six Gauguins didn’t average as much as 100 francs each. The Guillaumins went for between 80 and 160 apiece. Pissarro got up to more than 400, but a Seurat was knocked down for 50, and a Van Gogh for 30.
Papa Tanguy would have been deeply hurt, no doubt, to read of these prices. He had so longed to see his painters triumph—and that triumph, as it seemed, lay still in the distant future. But it was nearer than those concerned then dared to think. Only a year later Vollard was to hold his Cézanne exhibition, and in 1899, at the Chocquet sale, the painting by Cézanne which Chocquet had bought at the Tanguy sale (it was the Pont de Maincy) was to fetch 2,200 francs. Thereafter the prices rose continually—and not of Cézanne only, but of all Papa Tanguy’s painters.
He never got rich, Papa Tanguy, but he wrote a fine page in the history of French art.
RECOMMENDED READING
BIOGRAPHIES
Rather than provide pages and pages of annotated biographies, I have simply provided below the titles of books representing a wide range of people, and I hope that you will be interested to know more about one or two of them. This list, by no means comprehensive, includes Parisian or French men and women as well as expatriates of several nationalities for whom Paris was a part of their lives.
Albert Camus: A Biography, Herbert Lottman (Doubleday, 1979).
Colette
Creating Colette, Volume I: From Ingénue to Libertine, 1873–1913 (1998) and Volume II: From Baroness to Woman of Letters, 1912–1954 (1999), both by Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier and published by Steerforth.
Colette: Earthly Paradise: An Autobiography Drawn from Her Lifetime Writings (1966) and Belles Saisons: A Colette Scrapbook (1978), both by Robert Phelps and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Maurice Goudeket, Colette’s third husband, whom she unsuccessfully hid from the Nazis but successfully managed to free from deportation to Auschwitz, wrote two of his own books about life with Colette: The Delights of Growing Old: An Uncommon Biography (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968) and Close to Colette: Intimate Portrait of a Woman of Genius (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957; Greenwood, 1973).
Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story, Amanda Vaill (Houghton Mifflin, 1998) and Living Well Is the Best Revenge, Calvin Tomkins (Viking, 1971; Modern Library, 1998). Tender Is the Night is one of my favorite F. Scott Fitzgerald novels. When I first read it, I knew it was loosely based on the dazzling American expatriates Gerald and Sara Murphy, but I had no clue how much of it was fiction, and I have remained fascinated by the Murphys. With the publication of these two books, fact and fiction have been sorted out. Of the two, Calvin Tomkins, longtime art critic for the New Yorker, writes the smaller but not in any way lesser book. Living Well relates the Murphys’ story concisely and engagingly, accompanied by black-and-white