The admission of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art into British collections, both public and private, was a very slow process. Despite the steady drum-beating by Roger Fry and Clive Bell of the influential Bloomsbury set, great French paintings from Manet to Matisse were simply not going to England in the way that they were to Russia, to America, to Germany, and even to tiny Denmark in the years preceding the First World War.

In the United States, from before 1880, the Havemeyers, the Potter Palmers, the Whittemores, and some others on a smaller scale were buying Monets and Degas, influenced by the fact that the Durand-Ruel firm had opened in New York and had focused much of its sales effort on Americans. In Russia, the incomparable collectors Schukine and Morosov began about 1903 to collect masterworks by Picasso and Matisse, but also Van Goghs, Cézannes, and Gauguins from which the younger artists’ modernist work derived. Both Russians knew Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, who had settled in Paris in 1903. Gertrude Stein in turn greatly influenced the Cone sisters from Baltimore, who started to buy on their annual trips to Paris early in the century.

By 1921, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, still a bastion of academic conservatism (despite its having bought, in 1913, a Cézanne out of the Armory Show—the first Cézanne to be purchased by an American museum), mounted its first exhibition of Impressionist art with many loans from the Havemeyer collection.

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