Frank Rutter - The French Impressionist Fund

The French Impressionist Fund

In 1903 the creation of the National Art Collections Fund initiated many years of frustration for Rutter, who believed it would siphon off available money from his own aims. He was a strong supporter of Impressionist and Expressionist Modernism. He considered "perfectly dreadful" the lack of such work in the national collections, pointing out in 1905 that the only example of the modern French school was Edgar Degas' The Ballet from Robert the Devil (1876) in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Raging with indignation, he wrote articles on this omission, gave lectures, and, galvanised by the opening of the Impressionist exhibition staged by Durand-Ruel at the Grafton Galleries in London in 1905, he persuaded the editor and proprietors of The Sunday Times to allow space for a public subscription, the French Impressionist Fund. Sargent and Wertheimer each sent ten guineas; Blanche Marchesi staged a fund-raising concert; Rutter, although "extremely nervous" gave his first lecture at the Grafton Galleries. Sir Claude Phillips and D.S. MacColl joined him on the executive committee of the fund, and contributions slowly mounted up to £160, sufficient at that time to buy a top class Impressionist painting.

Rutter's choice was Monet's Vétheuil: Sunshine and Snow (since retitled Lavacourt under Snow), which MacColl was in favour of and Durand-Ruel had promised to sell for the amount collected, but Phillips pointed out that National Gallery did not accept work by living artists; discreet enquiries revealed that the gallery trustees also found too "advanced" Manet, Sisley and Pissarro: "They were certainly dead—but they had not been dead long enough for England", wrote Rutter, adding "I nearly wept with disappointment."

MacColl ascertained that the trustees would accept Eugène Boudin, who Rutter protested was not an Impressionist but whom he accepted out of necessity, mollified by MacColl's argument that "he's the beginning of Impressionism and we can make a start with him." To avoid any accusations of logrolling Durand-Ruel's exhibition, they agreed that Rutter would travel to Van der Veldt, a private collector in Le Havre, to choose a Boudin painting. He brought back as personal luggage Boudin's 1888 painting, Entre les jetées, Trouville (The Entrance to Trouville Harbour), and wrote to MacColl on 11 October 1905 to inform him of the work he had selected, which Van der Veldt had accepted £120 for provided it would go to a national collection and which was waiting at the Goupil Gallery for MacColl to see.

It was shown privately at the Goupil Gallery for the subscribers, and presented in January 1906 to the National Gallery through the National Art Collections Fund, which Rutter said was keen to act as a channel for the prestigious presentation, but had not given "the slightest help or encouragement when I needed it most." It made Rutter "boil with rage" to contrast this with the Fund's spending of thousands of pounds on older paintings; he said, "the Fund's inertia and snobbish ineptitude are entirely characteristic of the art-officialdom in England."