Gustave Caillebotte

Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894) was born in Paris to a wealthy textile merchant who had made a fortune supplying cloth to the French military during the Crimean and Franco-Prussian wars. He trained as an engineer and lawyer before turning seriously to painting, entering Léon Bonnat's studio in 1873. He met the Impressionist circle through Renoir and first exhibited with them in 1876, bringing an income and organizational energy that proved as important to the group as his painting. He funded Impressionist exhibitions, paid the rent for struggling artists including Monet, and left a collection of sixty-five Impressionist paintings to the French state at his death — a bequest so significant and so poorly managed by the government that it sparked a national controversy. His own painting combined Impressionist color with a precision of structure, perspective, and surface unusual in the group: Paris Street, Rainy Day (1877) is among the most technically accomplished paintings of the era. He painted workers — floor scrapers, house painters — with a frontal, matter-of-fact dignity, and Parisian life with a slightly alienated overhead viewpoint that gives his street scenes their peculiar psychological quality. He was an enthusiastic sailor and horticulturalist and spent increasing time at Petit-Gennevilliers on the Seine. He died of pulmonary congestion aged 45 in 1894, having devoted his adult life with equal passion to painting, sailing, and supporting his friends.

Caillebotte combined Impressionist color with an unusual structural precision — strong perspective grids, flattened picture planes, high viewpoints looking down at sharply receding streets. His handling is tighter than Monet's or Renoir's but his palette absorbed their brightness. He was particularly interested in compositional geometry: the diagonals of wet cobblestones, the recession of Haussmann's boulevards, the precise angles of a man's back bent over a floor plane. His paintings have a slightly vertiginous quality — the perspective is always slightly more extreme than comfortable, pulling the viewer into the picture. He painted the new Paris of Haussmann's rebuilding with a sociological attentiveness: the wide boulevards, the middle-class umbrella-carriers, the workers who built it all. His male nudes are among the most frank and unsentimental of the period.

Caillebotte's significance has grown steadily since his rediscovery in the 1970s. His painting of Haussmann's rebuilt Paris — the most ambitious urban transformation of the 19th century — is the most systematic visual record we have of that new city and its social frictions. His support of the Impressionist movement as patron, organizer, and advocate was arguably as important as his painting; without his money, several of the group's exhibitions would not have happened. His bequest to the French state, after years of negotiation, placed core Impressionist works in what became the Musée d'Orsay.