René Gimpel was a prominent French art dealer, friend and patron of living artists and collector. He was the son of a picture dealer and the brother-in-law of Sir Joseph Duveen. His witty and acerbic Journal d'un Collectionneur, translated and published as Diary of an Art Dealer, are a primary source for the contemporary history of modern art

Modern art

Modern art includes artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of...

 and of collecting between the World Wars.

Trained in the classic traditions of connoisseurship, a great admirer of Chardin

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin was an 18th-century French painter. He is considered a master of still life, and is also noted for his genre paintings which depict kitchen maids, children, and domestic activities...

, Gimpel had an instinctive sympathy for the modern contemporaries among whom he moved: Georges Braque

Georges Braque

Georges Braque[p] was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art style known as Cubism.-Early Life:...

, Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt

Mary Stevenson Cassatt was an American painter and printmaker. She lived much of her adult life in France, where she first befriended Edgar Degas and later exhibited among the Impressionists...

, Claude Monet

Claude Monet

Claude Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. . Retrieved 6 January 2007...

, Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...

 and above all, his intimate friend Marie Laurencin

Marie Laurencin

Marie Laurencin was a French painter and printmaker. -Biography:Laurencin was born in Paris, where she was raised by her mother and lived much of her life. At 18, she studied porcelain painting in Sèvres...

. The friend of Anatole France

Anatole France

Anatole France , born François-Anatole Thibault, , was a French poet, journalist, and novelist. He was born in Paris, and died in Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire. He was a successful novelist, with several best-sellers. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters...

, and Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...

 in his last years, he had a selective high regard for many museum professionals but a loathing of the experts who provided attributions and certificates of authenticity for paintings in the market, above all, for Bernard Berenson

Bernard Berenson

Bernard Berenson was an American art historian specializing in the Renaissance. He was a major figure in pioneering art attribution and therefore establishing the market for paintings by the "Old Masters".-Personal life:...

, deeply embroiled with Duveen.

In 1907 he had an option with Nathan Wildenstein to buy the collection of Rodolphe Kann, with what were considered in those days ten Rembrandts; bringing in Duveen, the consortium bought the entire collection for $4.2 million, split it up and made vast profits. Repeated trips to the United States garnered him further fortunes from sales to American collectors, whom he skewered in his private diaries, as showing off all their pictures "like rich children showing off their toys". In May 1919, three weeks of concentrated trading resulted in sales of five paintings, including Rembrandt's Portrait of Titus to Jules Bache

Jules Bache

Jules Semon Bache was a German-born American banker, art collector and philanthropist.-Biography:Born in Germany, as a young boy his family emigrated to the United States, settling in New York City. In 1881, he started work as a cashier at Leopold Cahn & Co., a stockbrokerage firm founded by his...

, a tapestry and a Houdon portrait bust, for $730,000.

During World War II Gimpel was interned by the Vichy authorities

Vichy France

Vichy France, Vichy Regime, or Vichy Government, are common terms used to describe the government of France that collaborated with the Axis powers from July 1940 to August 1944. This government succeeded the Third Republic and preceded the Provisional Government of the French Republic...

 for his activities in the Resistance

French Resistance

The French Resistance is the name used to denote the collection of French resistance movements that fought against the Nazi German occupation of France and against the collaborationist Vichy régime during World War II...

, released in 1942, but then re-arrested. In confinement he taught English to his fellow prisoners, in preparation, he said, for their coming liberation. Sent to Neuengamme concentration camp, Germany, his health gave out under the strenuous conditions under which he was held.