The Impressionists

Director: Phil Grabsky

Genre: Documentary

Production companies: Phil Grabsky Films, Seventh Art Productions

Duration: 91 minutes

Year: 2015

Copyright: Seventh Art Productions

Synopsis: Monet, Cezanne, Degas, Renoir: some of the world’s most popular artists. Their works, and that of their contemporaries, fetch tens of millions of dollars around the globe. But who were they really? Why & how exactly did they paint? What lies behind their enduring appeal? To help answer these questions, the film has secured unique access to a major new exhibition focussing on the 19th century Parisian art collector Paul Durand-Ruel, the outspoken champion of Impressionism. This eagerly anticipated exhibition is perhaps the most comprehensive ever held about the Impressionists. Durand-Ruel’s brave decision to exhibit the Impressionists in New York in 1886 introduced enlightened, wealthy Americans to modern French painting. In doing so, he not only filled great American galleries with Impressionist masterworks but also kept impressionism alive at a time when it faced complete failure. This energetic and revealing film will tell his remarkable story along with that of the Impressionists themselves.

Phil Grabsky (Producer, Director, Writer)

Phil Grabsky is a BAFTA-winning British documentary filmmaker who has received multiple awards for his directing, writing, producing, and cinematography. He and his company Seventh Art Productions are behind cinema films such as Muhammad Ali: Through the Eyes of the World, In Search of Beethoven, In Search of Mozart, and the landmark My Childhood, My Country: 20 Years in Afghanistan, which won Best Single Documentary at the 2022 Television BAFTAs and was also nominated for its cinematography. He has made over 250 films which have played in cinemas and on TV and digital platforms worldwide. As a writer, he has written four history books, including The Great Artists—co-authored with Tim Marlow—and the best-seller The Great Commanders. Grabsky is regularly involved as a judge for the Emmys, BAFTAs, Grierson, and One World awards, and has won numerous personal awards himself including Royal Television Society awards for both Best Director and Services to Television, and a Voice of the Listener and Viewer Award for Services to Education. In 2009, Grabsky and his colleagues began work on a new arts genre for the cinema: Exhibition on Screen, which began with Leonardo Live. The aim of the project is to increase access to these exhibitions and their curatorial context. Exhibition on Screen now plays in 1500 cinemas and 60+ countries worldwide. Its website lists 34 films on artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt, David Hockney, and Paul Cézanne.

Paul Durand-Ruel

Paul Durand-Ruel was a French art dealer associated with the Impressionists and the Barbizon School. Being the first to support artists such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, he is known for his innovations in modernizing art markets, and is generally considered to be the most important art dealer of the nineteenth century. Durand-Ruel cultivated international interest in French artists by establishing art galleries and exhibitions in London, New York, Berlin, Brussels, among other places, which played an important role in decentralizing the Salon System that had monopolized the art market in France.

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