Hôtel Drouot

The place, briefly

The Hôtel Drouot has been the auction house of Paris since 1852, and almost everything that has changed hands in the French art market has passed through its rooms at some point.

Gustave Caillebotte's role there was unusual. He had inherited a large fortune, and he used it at Drouot and elsewhere to buy the work of painters who could not sell — Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Degas, Cézanne, Manet. He paid properly rather than cheaply, which supported both the artists and the visible price of their work at a moment when a collapse in either would have been serious.

That collection became the Caillebotte bequest, and its acceptance by the French state after his death in 1894 was contested for years. What the state eventually took now forms a substantial part of the Impressionist holdings in Paris. Caillebotte's own paintings were largely forgotten in the process; he was remembered as a patron for most of a century before being looked at again as a painter.

The house has other business in this Atlas too: in 1891 Paul Gauguin auctioned thirty of his own canvases here to raise the fare to Tahiti.

The present building replaced the nineteenth-century halls in the 1970s. Viewings remain free and open, which makes it one of the easier art-world interiors in Paris to walk into.