A tiny Renoir began impressive obsession Bloch collection gets its first public exhibition

After one misstep, Blochs focused, successfully, on French paintings.

That’s the businessman talking — the Henry Bloch who co-founded the tax service giant H&R Block Inc.

But all along, it seems, the art lover kept the upper hand in decisions about the collection.

“I didn’t do it for investment,” Bloch said. “I never planned to sell any of them.”

Bloch did sell the couple’s Degas of three dancing girls when a better one came along.

“This was so much finer,” he said, indicating the work that replaced it, a pastel and gouache of a single ballerina titled “Dancer Making Points” (1879-80).

And he turned down a painting by Monet of the artist’s son Jean riding a tricycle. “I didn’t like the child’s expression,” Bloch explains.

A favorite painting of his is Cezanne’s “The Card Players,” in the collection of the Barnes Foundation. He was thrilled when he had the opportunity to acquire Cezanne’s “Man With a Pipe,” an oil study of the standing man in the large painting.

“That’s as close as I could get,” he said.

Over the years the Blochs rarely have loaned their artworks, save to a few important shows. The “Cezanne in Provence” exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., included their Cezanne landscape “Quarry at Bibémus.” In 1996, the couple lent one of their Pissarros, “Banks of the Seine at Port Marly,” to an Impressionist exhibit at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.

Locally Nelson curator George McKenna (now curator emeritus of prints and drawings) managed to wangle the loan of the Blochs’ “Jane Avril” by Toulouse-Lautrec in 1984, after proving to Bloch that the work had been shown at the Nelson before — in the 1935 show “100 Years of French Painting.”

Although the artworks don’t get out much, many experts have seen the collection in the Blochs’ home, and the couple enjoy hearing what they think.

The director of the Getty pronounced Cezanne’s “Quarry at Bibémus” the “best picture,” Bloch said. A group that came through from the Art Institute of Chicago conferred the same honor on Redon’s “The Green Vase.”

Simon Kelly, associate curator of European painting and sculpture at the Nelson, likes Sisley’s “Rue de la Princesse, Winter.”

“It’s a sensitive and subtle picture,” said Kelly, who is curating the Bloch Impressionist exhibit.

The painting received a full-page reproduction in John Rewald’s book The History of Impressionism, a definitive work on the movement.

That kind of exposure is priceless.

“I thought I paid too much for everything I bought,” Bloch said. “I couldn’t afford any of these pictures today.”

| Alice Thorson

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