Writing impressionism into the Musee du Luxembourg's history of nineteenth-century art

Published in 1895, Leonce Benedite's Le Musee 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 Musee 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 Musee du Luxembourg preemptively ushered Impressionism into official art history, studying the intersections between Benedite's enthusiasm for this art and the French state's calls for fine-arts policies predicated on such republican principles as impartiality and eclecticism.