Sold for a song, stolen at gunpoint, immortal

The painting that named Impressionism was, for most of its early life, worth almost nothing. Its journey from cheap sketch to priceless icon is a story of bargains, a bankruptcy, an inheritance, and — best of all — an armed robbery. To follow it you need one plain word: provenance, which just means the documented chain of who owned a work of art, from the artist’s hand to wherever it sits now. Provenance is the painting’s paper trail, and this one’s reads like a novel.

First owner: Ernest Hoschedé, a department-store magnate and one of the early collectors brave (or rich) enough to buy this strange new work. He bought Impression, Sunrise in 1874, around the time of that first exhibition, for 800 francs.Not a fortune, but a real price — somebody believed in it.

Then the story takes its first turn. Hoschedé’s fortune collapsed; he went bankrupt, and in 1878 his collection was sold off at a forced auction at the Hôtel Drouot, the big Paris auction house. At that fire sale, Impression, Sunrise — the future emblem of a whole movement — went for 210 francs. It had lost nearly three-quarters of its value in four years. The buyer was Dr. Georges de Bellio, a Romanian-born homeopathic doctor in Paris who was one of the earliest and most loyal collectors of the Impressionists, a man who quietly bought their work when almost no one else would. He got the most important painting of the movement for the price of, roughly, a nice piece of furniture. That 210-franc bargain is the “sold for a song” fact, and it’s true, and it’s a useful corrective every time someone tells you the great art of the past was always recognized as great. It wasn’t. For 210 francs you could have owned the painting that named Impressionism.

From de Bellio it stayed in the family. When he died in 1894 it passed down to his daughter Victorine and her husband, Eugène Donop de Monchy (some sources call him Ernest; the museum’s own record says Eugène). And in 1940, the Donop de Monchys gave the painting away — they donated it to the Musée Marmottan in Paris, the museum that holds it to this day. (One persistent error worth nailing down, because you’ll see it repeated even in respectable places: the painting is not in Le Havre. There’s a fine museum in Le Havre, Monet’s home city, that has borrowedit for shows — but its permanent home is the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris. The painting of Le Havre lives in the capital.)

And it might have stayed a quiet, treasured fixture of that museum forever, except for what happened on a Sunday morning in 1985.

On October 27, 1985, in broad daylight, a group of armed men walked into the Musée Marmottan, pulled out guns, held the staff and visitors at gunpoint, and robbed the place like a bank. They walked out with nine paintings. Five of them were Monets — and the prize, the one the theft is remembered for, was Impression, Sunriseitself. The painting that named Impressionism was now a stolen object, gone, somewhere out in the criminal underworld, its whereabouts unknown. (The police would later tie the robbery to organized crime, with reported links to the Japanese underworld — though “reported” is the right word for that part; the museum-heist details are solid, the mob backstory was the kind of thing that circulates around a famous theft.)

It was missing for five years. Then, in December 1990, French police recovered the whole haul — the nine Marmottan paintings — in a villa in Porto-Vecchio, in southern Corsica, the French island in the Mediterranean. But the painting did not come back clean. Hidden away for half a decade in a damp Mediterranean villa, Impression, Sunrise had suffered from the humidity; its varnish had discolored and the surface needed work. So before it could go back on the wall, conservators — the specialists who clean and repair paintings — treated it: they removed the dulled, discolored varnish and brought the colors back. Only then, in 1991, repaired and restored, did it return to the Musée Marmottan and back onto public view, where it hangs now.

So sit with the arc of this object. It began as a rapid little sketch of a smoky home harbor, painted in one dawn from a hotel window, by a man fresh back from dodging a war. A critic said wallpaper was more finished than it. It sold for 800 francs, then crashed to 210 at a bankruptcy sale, a bargain even then. It accidentally lent its title to a movement that would become one of the best-loved in all of art. It was donated to a museum, stolen at gunpoint, lost for five years, found in a Corsican villa, and nursed back to health. And today it is one of the most famous paintings on the planet — the foggy little dawn that gave Impressionism its name, hanging safe in Paris, still doing the one trick no one taught it: making a sun glow without ever being bright.