Gustave Caillebotte
1848 -1894
Gustave Caillebotte was a French painter, member and a generous patron of the Impressionists, stamp collector, and yacht engineer. He shared the Impressionists’ commitment to optical truth. But Caillebotte’s style belongs to the school of Realism. His own works, until recently, were neglected.
Many of Caillebotte’s paintings depict members of his family and daily domestic life, interiors, and figures in a landscape. But he is most well known for his paintings of urban Paris, such as “The Floor Scrapers”, 1875, “Le pont de l’Europe”, 1876, and “Paris Street, Rainy Day”, 1877. These paintings were quite controversial for their banal and often lower-class subjects, and for their exaggerated, plunging perspective. The tilted ground common to these paintings is very characteristic of Caillebotte’s work, which may have been strongly influenced by Japanese prints and the new technology of photography.
Gustave Caillebotte was born 1848 in Paris. His father, Martial Caillebotte, was the inheritor of the family’s textile. When Caillebotte’s father bought large property in Yerres, Gustave probably began to draw and paint.
Gustave earned a law degree in 1868 and a license to practice law in 1870. Shortly after the Franco-Prussian war, Caillebotte began visiting the studio of painter Léon Bonnat, where he began to seriously study painting. In 1873, he entered into the École des Beaux-Arts, but apparently did not spend much time there. He met Edgar Degas, Giuseppe de Nittis, Claude Monet, and Pierre Auguste Renoir in 1874 and helped organize the first impressionist exhibition in Paris that same year. He participated in later shows and painted some 500 works in a more realistic style than that of his friends.
Caillebotte’s sizable allowance and the inheritance he received after the death of his parents allowed him to paint without the pressure to sell his work. It also allowed him to help support Imressionist fellow artists and friends by purchasing their works.
Caillebotte’s style belongs to the school of Realism as did his predecessors Jean-Francois Millet and Gustave Courbet, as well his contemporary Degas, Caillebotte aimed to paint reality as it existed and as he saw it, hoping to reduce painting’s inherent theatricality. Caillebotte’s most intriguing paintings are those of the broad, new Parisian boulevards. The boulevards were painted from high vantage points and were populated with elegantly clad figures strolling with the expressionless intensity of somnambulists.
Caillebotte’s painting career slowed dramatically in the 1890s, when he stopped making large canvases and showing his work. Caillebotte died in 1894 of pulmonary congestion in Paris.
For many years, Caillebotte’s reputation as a painter was superseded by his reputation as a supporter of the arts. Seventy years after his death, however, art historians began reevaluating his artistic contributions.
