How Henri Canonne became ‘one of the greatest French collectors of Impressionist art’

In January 1924, when Henri Canonne purchased Claude Monet’s Water-Lilies, Setting Sun, painted around 1907, through the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris, the artist made an unusual request. Could he hold onto it for a few weeks, until after his cataract operation, so that he could see it afresh one final time?

The anecdote could be apocryphal, but it certainly highlights the closeness between Monet and one of his greatest patrons, who at the peak of his collecting owned some 40 works by the painter — including more than a dozen from his celebrated Nymphéas series.

Many of those Monet pictures now reside in important museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Denver Art Museum; the Museum Barberini, Potsdam; and Winston Churchill’s former home, Chartwell, in Kent. Water-Lilies, Setting Sun now hangs in the National Gallery in London. Another work, Nymphéas, temps gris, sold at Christie’s in 2022 for more than £30 million.

Born in 1867, Canonne became a successful pharmacist. In 1900, he registered the trademark for Valda, a sweet lozenge of peppermint, eucalyptus and thyme to remedy throat irritations — a growing problem in coal-powered metropolises.

The lozenge was a global success and made Canonne fabulously wealthy, and by 1920 he had begun to hunt down works of art by the masters of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Aided by a handful of dealers, he acquired multiple works by Pissarro, Renoir, Bonnard, Vuillard, Sisley, Signac, Cezanne, Matisse and more, to complement his many Monets. Just a decade later, the collection was so admired that the art critic Arsène Alexandre devoted a whole book to it.

On 9 April 2025, Christie’s in Paris presents a rare chance to acquire a piece of this legendary collection in the sale Ancienne collection Henri Canonne — Une leçon impressionniste, offering 33 pictures that epitomise what Alexandre called the ‘Canonne taste’.

Below, specialists Antoine Lebouteiller and Valérie Didier pick out some of their highlights from the sale.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jeune fille appuyée sur sa main (1894)

This was painted two decades after Impressionism had exploded onto the scene, and several years after Renoir — now in his fifties — had retreated to the south of France to help alleviate the pain of his arthritis.

It shows a model — likely a young woman named Yvonne Lerolle — wearing a white dress over an emerald-green undergarment. Fashion was a key element of Renoir’s pictures, and he’d gained an intimate knowledge of the technical aspects of fabric first-hand: his mother was a seamstress, his father a tailor and his elder sister a dressmaker, and he married a fashion illustrator.

When dressing his models, Renoir was known to commission custom outfits from the designer Marie Callot, often requesting loose, scarf-like swags of cloth to be added to a dress’s shoulders. It was here, in the thick folds and heavy drapes of cloth, that the artist could fully examine the luminosity of various fabrics to full effect.

Camille Pissarro, Le Quartier de l’Hermitage, Pontoise (1874)

In December 1873, two years after Pissarro and his family had returned to Pontoise, a tranquil village around 25km north-west of Paris, the art critic Théodore Duret wrote to him with some advice.

‘You do not have Sisley’s decorative sense or Monet’s fantastical eye,’ he said. ‘But you possess a quality they do not — an intimate and profound feeling for nature… In your pursuit of rustic nature, you will embark on a new course, one as far-reaching and elevated as that of any master.’

Heeding Duret’s advice, Pissarro quickly abandoned his dark palette and heavy impasto, and within months of the missive painted this light-filled landscape of a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Pontoise.

It was also created within a matter of months — or possibly even weeks — of the opening of the ‘Société anonyme coopérative des artistes peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs’ in Paris, now known as the first ever Impressionist exhibition. As part of it, Pissarro exhibited no fewer than five works — all of which were dazzling nature scenes.

Albert Marquet, Villa Mauresque (1921) and L’îlot (1922)

Like his lifelong friend and fellow Fauvist painter Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet was a brilliant colourist. He had a fascination with the spectral effects of light, especially on water, which led him to spend a large portion of his life away from his Parisian studio visiting port cities from Tangier to Venice.

He first stayed in Algiers in 1920, after his dealer’s wife, Madame Druet, introduced him to Louis Méley, a wealthy Algerian industrialist and art enthusiast who welcomed travelling artists to his villa. Marquet returned in the following years, painting these two views of the city, Villa Mauresque and L’îlot, in 1921 and 1922, respectively.

Villa Mauresque shows the view from the villa across the district of El Bair, a wealthy enclave full of villas and gardens overlooking the bay. L’îlot was probably painted from an apartment Marquet eventually took on Boulevard de France. This serene image depicts the harbour, with its zoological station, the shrine of Sidi Robrini and an archway leading to the northern pier.

Both these pictures were acquired by the Bernheim-Jeune gallery immediately after their creation, entering Canonne’s collection within the same decade.

Pierre Bonnard, Femme à demi-nue ou Nu se coiffant devant la glace (c. 1915)

This painting depicts Marthe de Méligny, Bonnard’s muse, mistress and eventual wife. The pair first became acquainted in 1893, six years before Bonnard became a founding member of Les Nabis — an avant-garde group of painters who explored the symbolic and spiritual possibilities of art.

When they met, she was selling artificial flowers in Paris, and claimed to be an orphaned, penniless Italian aristocrat. On the day of their wedding, in 1925, he learned of her true identity: born to a modest family from the Berry region of central France. Their love story became the subject of the 2023 film Bonnard, Pierre et Marthe.

Bonnard painted Marthe throughout his career. Here she is shown wrapped in a towel from the waist down, with her blonde hair cascading down her back. Her reflection in the mirror breaks the illusion of her modesty.

The artist was continuously fascinated with painting interior scenes, writing in his diary that he wanted ‘to show what one sees when one enters a room all of a sudden’. These snapshots of domesticity gave him a space where, through an economical use of paint, irregular strokes, and a dry brush, he could explore subtle nuances of light and texture.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, La Leçon d’écriture (c. 1905)

This work was acquired by Canonne sometime before 1930. Prior to that, it was with the Parisian galleries Bernheim-Jeune and Durand-Ruel. The latter was founded by Paul Durand-Ruel, who was the first dealer to support the Impressionist painters Monet, Pissarro and Renoir, initially at his outpost in London.

The painting depicts the artist’s youngest son, Claude, or ‘Coco’, clasping a red pencil, as his nanny Gabrielle tenderly tutors him. The boy’s sweetness is emphasised by his rosy cheeks and long, blonde locks, which Renoir insisted he grew so that he could have the pleasure to ‘paint gold’.

The work is one of around 200 depictions of Gabrielle that Renoir painted between the mid-1890s and his death in 1919. In 1959, Claude recalled how during his father’s final years, Gabrielle would assist him with mixing his colours and preparing his canvases. ‘I can see our “Ga” holding the palette,’ he recalled, ‘the weight of which he could no longer bear.’

Another version of the picture, in which the flower-covered wallpaper has been swapped for a vase of blooms, and the red and white of Gabrielle’s shirt and the wall behind are inverted, hangs in the celebrated Impressionist collection of the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.

Johan Barthold Jongkind, Paysage du Dauphiné (1883)

In 1862, at La Ferme Saint-Siméon, a hotel frequented by artists on the Seine estuary in Normandy, the Dutch painter and printmaker Johan Barthold Jongkind met with a young Monet. Being some 20 years older, Jongkind soon became his mentor. ‘To him I owe the true teaching of my eye,’ Monet would later write to his painter friend Frédéric Bazille.

In 1874, Jongkind was invited to participate in the first Impressionist exhibition alongside his pupil, but declined. Eight years later, the art dealer Détrimont mounted the only solo show Jongkind ever had while alive — he died in an asylum in 1891, following bouts of depression and alcoholism.

Today, Jongkind’s atmospheric studies of fleeting light are celebrated as a forerunner of Impressionism. Signac himself referred to him as the ‘renovator of modern landscape painting’.

The landscape Paysage du Dauphiné, which was rapidly painted en plein air across two adjoining sheets in the artist’s sketchbook, is one of 14 watercolours in the upcoming sale that reflect the Dutch painter’s love for French panoramas, from Grenoble to Honfleur, via La Côte-Saint-André — his final resting place.

Ancienne collection Henri Canonne — Une leçon impressionniste is on view at Christie’s in Paris, 2-9 April 2025, as part of the 20th and 21st Century Art spring auctions. Find out more about the preview exhibition and sales in April