In March 2019, Dutch National Opera presents the fourth edition of the Opera Forward Festival, with as its central theme Identity and confrontation.

The National Gallery, 4 March – 31 May 2015 This is an exhibition for budding entrepreneurs as much as artists. It is concerned with the mastermind behind the Impressionist movement – its benefactor, champion and pioneer – as much as the artists themselves. Indeed the show’s full title is “Inventing Impressionism: Paul Durand-Ruel and the Modern Art Market”.

This narrative approach is made clear as soon as you enter the exhibition space. The first room has cleverly been made to feel as if it’s Durand-Ruel’s drawing room, the doors into which were painted by Monet and are on display.

Two grand, antique armchairs are in the centre of the room. The only time I have been made to think about the person who acquired art in such a way, and made a difference culturally, was at the wondrous A G Leventis Gallery in Nicosia. Tekst blagodarstvennogo pisma opekunam.

It’s one of the best modern galleries in the world, and worth seeking out. There, the Cypriot curators offer a fascinating insight into Leventis’ life as a private collector, going so far as to recreate his entire Parisian apartment. The paintings in this exhibition are rich and absorbing, of course.

It does feels very odd to think back to how reviled and revolted the Paris Salon establishment was by them. They now seem very old fashioned.

Yet full of virtuosity. With Durand-Ruel’s stubborn showmanship and vision, the group faced down critical snobbery and adversity – for example, Renoir’s painting of the human body in “Study: Torso, Sunlight Effect”, which shows a woman dappled in spots of sunlight, was described by one critic as a demonstration of “putrefaction in a corpse”. This is decidedly a good parallel – but an ignorant one, all the same.

We learn how Durand-Ruel ingeniously took a punt on these artists and then cannily set about driving up prices and demand – creating a boom marketplace for them, despite all the establishment’s disdain. All this serves to remind today’s British punter of modern art maestros such as Charles Saatchi, or in terms of curators, Norman Rosenthal (of Royal Academy “Sensation” fame). It’s not surprising that real success came when they decamped to New York, the American elite more ready to embrace European artistic innovation than the continent’s own. I wonder what of today’s modern art scene will remain in 150 years’ time. Further biographical, pecuniary snapshots set the scene for the brushstrokes. For example, Pissarro’s “The Lock at Pontoise” was enabled by Durand-Ruel’s largesse: the helpful guide tells us, “The artist’s former home had been pillaged during the Franco-Prussian War and almost his entire life’s work, over 1,000 paintings, had been lost”. This poignancy is compounded in the next room, when we see the strikingly dour “Farm at Montfoucault” (1874) – painted when the art dealer himself was under huge financial pressure. The dully-lit canvas is illuminated when we read that “Pissarro was hardest hit by Duran-Ruel’s financial difficulties.