Madame Victor Chocquet

In March 1875 Renoir and three friends, Monet, Sisley and Berthe Morisot, put their paintings up for auction in Paris to raise some cash. It went badly. The room jeered, the police were nearly called, and the canvases went for almost nothing. But one man in the crowd was paying honest attention: Victor Chocquet, a customs clerk who had built a real collection on a small salary by buying what he loved rather than what was fashionable. That same evening he wrote to Renoir asking him to paint his wife. This is the result. Madame Chocquet sits composed and at ease, her husband's taste already backing a kind of painting most of Paris still refused. Chocquet would go on to become the great early champion of Cezanne, whose work almost no one else would touch.