“This 19th-century love affair between American money and innovative French art might seem an unlikely one. Surveying his fellow Americans in Europe in the 1870s, Henry James had been appalled: ‘There is but one word to use in regard to them – vulgar, vulgar, vulgar … It’s the absolute and incredible lack of culture that strikes you in common travelling Americans.’ Yet it was these Americans, or at least the opulent advance guard among them, who would come to the rescue of struggling and despised French artists, and who found in Impressionism the beauty and value that for many decades evaded so much of the French artistic establishment.”