Dieterle Family

Biographical/Historical Note

The Dieterle family has owned an art gallery in Paris since the early 20th century, and takes pride in three generations of Corot experts. The Fonds Dieterle grew out of the various portions of archives acquired through Jean Dieterle, along with works of art, as the family built its gallery business, and in the course of which they developed their expertise in Corot.

Some of the earliest sales records in this archive were collected by Ernest Le Roy (galerie Ernest Le Roy, rue Scribe, Paris) in the late 19th century. In 1905 Jean Dieterle became the director of galerie Ernest Le Roy, and he avidly continued building the archive Le Roy had begun, collecting 19th and early 20th century sales records that documented art works and their market.

They acquired the stock books and ledgers, inventories and sales catalogs, and photographs of stock of the 19th century French galleries Goupil & Cie, Boussod Valadon & Co., Tedesco Frères, Arnold et Tripp, Galerie Allard et Noel, Bague et Cie, Le Roy et Cie and Galerie Georges Petit, and perhaps others, as well as a library of auction, exhibition, and unpublished sale catalogs, dating from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Of these enterprises, the Galerie Goupil, founded in 1827 by Adolphe Goupil, was a central force in the French art market of the 19th century. The gallery had lavish showrooms in Paris, and branches in New York, London, Berlin, Brussels, and the Hague. In 1879 the Galerie Goupil was succeeded by the Galerie Boussod Valadon, directed by Adolphe's son-in-law, Etienne Boussod. Until its closing in 1919, Boussod Valadon continued the same trade in Romantic, Barbizon and academic artists as Goupil's, but - thanks to the manager of its Montmartre branch, Theo van Gogh - it also began to sponsor exhibitions of the work of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists such as Degas, Monet, Morisot, Pissarro, Gauguin, and Toulouse-Lautrec.

Galerie Georges Petit (photographs and glass negatives from the gallery are part of the collection) sold the work of many of the same artists as the Goupil and Boussod Valadon galleries: the generation of 1830 (Delacroix, Corot, Barbizon School), minor Realists, and the Impressionists after 1880. Petit acquired a portion of the Boussod Valadon stock when that gallery closed in 1919.

Tedesco Frères, Bague et Cie, and Arnold et Tripp (whose partial records are part of this archive) were not subsidiaries or successors in the Goupil-Boussod Valadon line, but they did command a portion of the same market during the period from 1880 to 1920.

From the guide to the Dieterle family records of French art galleries, 1846-1986, (Getty Research Institute)