Writing impressionism into the Musée du Luxembourg’s history of nineteenth-century art

ABSTRACT Published in 1895, Léonce Bénédite’s Le Musée du Luxembourg interceded in debates around Caillebotte Bequest, by elevating Impressionism as a style critical to the French state’s official history of nineteenth-century art. As the first fully illustrated catalogue dedicated to this institution, Le Musée du Luxembourg not only described the museum’s extant collection but, in effect, prescribed a future history of art to be narrated on its walls. Yet, the Caillebotte Bequest and its Impressionist paintings and works on paper were only installed at the museum in 1897. This article interrogates how Le Musée du Luxembourg preemptively ushered Impressionism into official art history, studying the intersections between Bénédite’s enthusiasm for this art and the French state’s calls for fine-arts policies predicated on such republican principles as impartiality and eclecticism.