Victor Chocquet

Victor Chocquet was a major supporter and patron of Impressionism. He also amassed a wide collection of Impressionist paintings, with a particular focus on Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Paul Cézanne.

Little is known about Chocquet’s early life. Born into a relatively well-off family of silk millers, Chocquet became a government official in the customs administration at the Ministry of Finance. Although he had no direct connections to the art world and had not grown up in an artistic family, Chocquet became interested in collecting, acquiring eighty-nine works by the painter Eugène Delacroix, as well as the work of realist painters Gustave Courbet and Honoré Daumier.

On March 24, 1875, he attended the historical Impressionist sale, which was organized at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris by members of the Société anonyme coopérative des artistes, peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs, an independent society established by Impressionist artists, including Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Renoir, and Alfred Sisley in reaction to their exclusion from the official Salon of 1873. Although he did not purchase any work at the sale, he became acquainted with Renoir and commissioned the artist to paint both his portrait (ca. 1875; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass.) and that of his wife (1876;Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Germany).

After the sale, Renoir introduced Chocquet to the work of other Impressionists, taking him first to the Parisian paint supply shop of Julien-François Tanguy (Père Tanguy) to see paintings by Cézanne. Chocquet began to purchase and commission paintings from the artist, among them two portraits and a landscape, The Seat at L’Estaque (1876; Fondation Rau pour le Tiers Monde, Zurich), made after the artist’s return to the region in June 1876. Chocquet lent the painting to the Third Impressionist Exhibition in 1877, which he visited almost daily; against the ridicule and disapproval of the press and the public, Chocquet strongly defended Cézanne’s work to exhibition visitors.

Chocquet retired in 1877 from his position as supervisor in the customs administration.From 1882 onward, his inheritance allowed him to expand his collection and acquire a property in Hattenville, Normandy, where Cézanne came to spend the summer in 1882, making four paintings, including the landscape Ferme en Normandie, été (Hattenville)(1882; private collection). After his death, Chocquet’s significant collection—which included thirty-two works by Cézanne, eleven by Renoir, eleven by Monet and one each by Pissarro and Sisley, as well as a number of works by Corot, Courbet, Daumier and Delacroix—was sold at the Hôtel Drouot in 1899.

In 2015 the Oskar Reinhart Collection Am Römerholz in Winterthur, Switzerland, organized the exhibition Victor Chocquet: Art Collector and Friend of the Impressionists Renoir, Cézanne, Monet, Manet, which not only reconstructed Chocquet’s expansive collections of modern art but also reunited—for the first time since they were sold in 1899—the most important portraits of Chocquet by Renoir and Cézanne.