HERE IS A piece about a person who, outside of art history circles, is little known to the museumgoing general public. But le père Tanguy—Father Tanguy?—has long been one of my favorite personalities of the French Impressionist period, and he is the subject of one of my favorite paintings by Van Gogh, in the permanent collection of the Musée Rodin.
Van Gogh painted three portraits of Tanguy, with the canvas in the Musée Rodin (circa 1887) being the most famous. The portrait shows Tanguy as an elderly man wearing a Breton straw hat against a background of colorful Japanese prints. At this time in the late 1800s, Japan was just beginning to open up to the Western world, and Japanese porcelain was being exported to France. The porcelain was wrapped 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, were at that time in the thick of the fight. Their first group exhibition was to open on the boulevard des Capucines in the spring of 1874; and on that occasion an art critic, M. Louis Leroy, who saw himself as something of a humorist, gave them the name of “Impressionists” in the Charivari; and, as everyone knows, the name stuck. Papa Tanguy became the most fervent and loyal of the Impressionists’ allies: as to just how this came about, a word of explanation is needed.
Papa Tanguy was a man of golden good nature. Heavy and dullish at first glance, he was in reality the most delicate, pure-minded and upright of men. He was easy-going almost to a fault: never did a painter appeal to him in vain for credit—and often this credit remained open indefinitely. Papa Tanguy was, in his own way, a stoic: “Anyone who spends more than fifty centimes a day is a blackguard,” he liked to say, and the phrase fits the man in whom the kindness of an evangelist was allied to a natural sympathy for the revolutionary and the rebel.
For Tanguy had put himself on the side of the rebels ever since he had fought with the Fédérés and had a taste of prison life. The Impressionists, his friends, were making enemies on every hand; they must be fought for, tooth and nail. In his simple, tender-hearted way Tanguy thought that painting in a high key was Revolution itself. Anyone who fought for the victory of Impressionism and stood up for “the men of our School” (he liked to linger on the word) was fighting for a radiant, high-keyed to-morrow. And besides—Tanguy liked Impressionist painting for itself, and detested the “tobacco-juice” tonality which the middle classes of his time had taken to their hearts.
Unendingly generous by nature, Tanguy liked to assemble “his” painters around his frugal table. Paints and canvas he gave them gladly, and in return would take a picture or two: and what pictures, after all! No one else would look at them. Ribaldry and sarcasm met them on every side: the Pissarros, it seemed, were simply “palette-scrapings laid one after another on dirty canvas”; the Monets were painted “much as people touch up fountain-basins”; and as for the Cézannes, they were best not talked of: it would be many years before they were considered as anything but “painting as a drunken scavenger would see it,” as someone remarked.
To get back some of his expenses—and, of course, to help his artists—Tanguy tried to sell some of the canvases which cluttered his shop in ever greater numbers; but only rarely did he succeed. His pictures were pledges that none could redeem. His collection grew steadily bigger and bigger until the shop became a real little avant-garde museum of contemporary art and a meeting-place for all those who supported the Impressionists and liked to know what was new in the world of art. It was Cézanne’s work, above all, that they came to see. During the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877 Cézanne was attacked so violently, and suffered so deeply in consequence, that he decided that never again would he show his pictures in public. For nearly twenty years—until the famous exhibition organised by Vollard in 1895, which marked the beginnings of his great fame—he took no part in the activities of the art world. And during all that time, or at any rate until Tanguy died in 1894, the shop in the rue Clauzel (moved meanwhile from no. 14 to no. 9, by the way) was the only place in Paris where Cézannes could be seen.
“People went to Tanguy’s as if to a museum,” Émile Bernard tells us, “to see some studies by the unknown painter who lived at Aix … The unpretentious shop became, without knowing it, a Parisian legend. It was talked of in every studio. Members of the Institut, influential critics and writers who wanted to set everything to rights—all flocked there. Such was the unsettling effect of these canvases … the young people sensed that they were works of genius, their elders saw in them the madness of paradox, and the envious invoked the name of impotence.”
Gauguin, Sérusier, Anquetin, Signac and Maurice Denis were among those who came to Papa Tanguy’s shop to learn the lesson of Cézanne. (Later, as is well known, Cézanne, never the most conciliatory of men, was to accuse Gauguin of stealing from him his petite sensation.) But there were many other regular visitors, from Octave Mirbeau to Francis Jourdain and Léon-Paul Fargue, and from Toulouse-Lautrec to Dom Verkade and Jacques-Émile Blanche. It was also—and this is a remarkable fact—in Tanguy’s window that in 1892 Ambroise Vollard saw a Cézanne for the first time. Nor, of course, must we forget Van Gogh who in 1886 and 1887 was a daily visitor to the shop. He had a profound admiration for Cézanne, and one day, to his great joy, he lunched with the Master of Aix at Tanguy’s. The two artists set forth their ideas on painting: at the end of the meal Van Gogh gave Cézanne one of his pictures and Cézanne, abrupt as ever, looked hard at it and said: “No, but honestly—that’s a madman’s painting.”
Tanguy held Cézanne in the deepest and most respectful regard; no less strong, for that matter, were his feelings for Van Gogh. And when, on returning from Provence in 1890, Van Gogh shot himself dead at Auvers-sur-Oise, Tanguy wept for him as if he had been his own son.
Octave Mirbeau once described a visit to Tanguy, not long after Van Gogh’s death. “Ah, poor Vincent!” Tanguy lamented. “What a misfortune! Monsieur Mirbeau! What a misfortune! What a great misfortune! A genius like him! And such a delightful fellow! But wait—I’ll show you some more of his masterpieces!” Papa Tanguy went off to fetch more Van Goghs from the back of his shop and came back with four or five in his arms and two in each hand. As he laid them lovingly against the backs of his chairs, shifting and turning them to get the best light, he went on groaning: “Poor Vincent! Are those masterpieces?—Or are they not? And there are so many of them, so many … And they’re so beautiful that when I look at them it gives me a pain here, in my breast … Why should a man like that die? It’s not right, it really isn’t … Poor Vincent … I’ll bet you don’t know his Pot of Gladiolus? It’s one of the last things he did. Marv—ellous, simply marv—ellous! I must show it to you—when it came to flowers there was no one to touch him, no one. He had such a feeling for everything …” And Papa drew a circle in the air, as painters do, as if to single out some part of a painting for particular notice. “Just look at that sky! And those trees! Aren’t they just right? And the color! And the movement, I ask you!”
From time to time some lover of painting would buy a picture from the shop in the rue Clauzel. But Papa Tanguy’s business methods were not at all those of the dealer-speculator. For his Cézannes he had a fixed price: a hundred francs for a large canvas, forty for a small one. The story is told of an enthusiast who asked the price of a Van Gogh: “Just a moment!” said Tanguy, and went and pored over his account book. “That’ll be forty-eight francs,” he said, finally. “Forty-eight? That’s an odd figure—why not fifty? Or forty?” “Well,” said Tanguy, “forty-eight francs is exactly what poor Van Gogh owed me when he died.”
No, Papa Tanguy was not at all a speculator. “How he loved the pictures that he was obliged to sell!” Dom Verkade remembered. “Often he was in despair at seeing so fine a picture go out of his shop.” And there was one picture that he would never consider selling: his own portrait by Van Gogh. (It is now in the Musée Rodin in Paris.) Vollard tells us that when anyone wanted to make a bid for it Tanguy would coldly ask a flat five hundred francs. This, at that time, was enough to put off any potential buyer at the start.
These idiosyncratic methods meant that Papa Tanguy never became rich—was never, indeed, even moderately well off. He remained to the day of his death frugal in the extreme and lived as sparingly as he possibly could. Yet fate had another hammer-blow in store for him: when he died, in 1894, it was of cancer of the stomach, and he had had to suffer appallingly. He had been taken to hospital, but when he sensed that the end was near he asked to be brought back to the rue Clauzel. “I want to die in my own home, with my wife beside me and my pictures all around.” One evening he gave his wife his last instructions: “Life won’t be easy for you when I’m not there. Our pictures are all we’ve got. You mustn’t hesitate to sell them …” He was saying good-bye: the next morning, February 6, 1894, he died.
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.