A critic in “La Chronique” said:
They provoke laughter, and yet they are lamentable. They display the profoundest ignorance of drawing, of composition, and of color. When children amuse themselves with a box of colors and a piece of paper they do better.
Cézanne was the one among them who both now and for a long time afterwards excited the most detestation. It is not too much to say that he was regarded almost as something monstrous and inhuman.
After the close of the exhibition a sale was had at the Hotel Drouot.
“Forty-five canvases of Caillebotte, Pissarro, Sisley, and Renoir realized only $1,522—an average of less than $34 each. The sale took place in the presence of an amused and contemptuous public, who received the pictures, as they were put up at auction, with groans. They amused themselves with passing several of them round from hand to hand, turned upside down.”
Sixteen Renoirs brought $400. The next year “le Pont de Chateau” sold for $8, “Jeune fille dans un Jardin” for $6, and “La Femme au Chat” for $16.
Sisley sold eleven for 1,387 francs, or $25 each. These prices meant disaster and the painter was in great distress. In 1878 he wrote Theodore Duret a pathetic letter asking if Duret could not find some friend who would have enough confidence in his, Sisley’s, future to pay $100 per month for six months and receive in return thirty pictures.
“At the expiration of six months, if he is not disposed to keep the thirty pictures, he can take the chances on a sale of twenty, get back the money he paid me, and have ten pictures left for nothing.”
During the New York Exhibition the Metropolitan Museum bought a Cézanne for something like $8,000. The price of a more important was $46,000. In the seventies in Paris there was a dealer in artists’ materials called Père Tanguy who had a little shop in rue de Navarin. In 1879 when Cézanne left Paris for the country he left his pictures for Père Tanguy to sell. Duret went there to buy some. He found them stacked against the wall, piled according to their dimensions, the small ones $8 each, the large ones $20.