Portrait of Victor Chocquet

In April 1876 the Impressionists held their second group show at Durand-Ruel's gallery on the rue Le Peletier, and Albert Wolff told readers of Le Figaro that it was the work of five or six lunatics, one of them a woman. The man in this portrait was among the few people in Paris buying them anyway. Victor Chocquet was a senior clerk in the French customs administration who spent a civil servant's salary on pictures, starting with Delacroix. He had found the Impressionists at an auction in March 1875 where the room jeered and the canvases went for almost nothing, and he wrote to Renoir soon after. Renoir introduced him to Cézanne, whom he then defended to anyone who laughed. When his collection was auctioned in Paris in July 1899, it held 32 Cézannes, 11 Renoirs and 11 Monets.