Two people kept the Impressionists financially afloat during their leanest years: the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who bought their paintings when almost no one else would, and the painter Gustave Caillebotte, whose family fortune let him buy his friends' work and cover their bills.
Without them, several of these painters would not have survived as artists.
The dealer who bet on them
Paul Durand-Ruel started buying from Monet and Pissarro in the early 1870s, when their paintings were unsellable in Paris.
In 1886, he shipped nearly 300 of their paintings to New York for a show at the American Art Association. It sold out in weeks. Durand-Ruel later said the two American shows that year saved him from ruin.
The painter who paid the rent
Gustave Caillebotte inherited a fortune and used it to buy paintings from Monet, Renoir, and their friends, often at prices well above what the market would pay.
He also covered studio rent for painters who could not.
When he died in 1894, his will left 70 Impressionist paintings to the French state. Officials accepted only 38 of them, after two years of resistance from the Academy.
I think Caillebotte gets far less credit for this than Durand-Ruel, even though he paid a steeper personal price for it.
An unlikely third name
Ernest Hoschedé, a department store magnate, collected and commissioned Monet's work through the 1870s, until he went bankrupt in 1878.
Monet's family moved in with the Hoschedés that same year. After Hoschedé left for Belgium and Monet's wife Camille died in 1879, Hoschedé's wife Alice stayed on to help raise Monet's sons. She later became his second wife.
What became of the paintings
Caillebotte's own paintings mostly went unsold in his lifetime. Paris Street, Rainy Day is now one of the most recognized works in the Art Institute of Chicago.
More on the painters this money kept working in Famous Impressionist Paintings.