Gustave Caillebotte
Painter of the modern city.
Gustave Caillebotte was wealthy and financed the Impressionists. He painted the new boulevards of Paris with bold perspective.
Gustave Caillebotte was born in 1848 in Paris into a very wealthy family. His father had made money supplying textiles to the army. Gustave took a law degree in 1870 and served in the Franco-Prussian War. He then began to study painting, first in Léon Bonnat’s studio and briefly at the École des Beaux-Arts.
In 1875 the Salon rejected his painting The Floor Scrapers, which shows workmen planing a parquet floor in a bourgeois apartment. The jury thought the subject vulgar. Instead he showed it at the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876. The painting is now in the Musée d'Orsay. His best-known work is Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877) in the Art Institute of Chicago. It shows people with umbrellas on one of the new, broad streets built when Paris was modernised.
Caillebotte was more realistic than most of the Impressionists. He painted with clearly defined form but was interested in light and weather. He used bold perspectives, with dramatically receding lines, and unusual viewpoints, such as looking straight down on the street from a balcony. He depicted modern bourgeois life: men on balconies, flâneurs, rowers and families at home.
Caillebotte used his fortune to help his friends. He rented premises for the exhibitions, paid rents and bought paintings by Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and others. Later he moved to Petit-Gennevilliers on the Seine, where he devoted himself to gardening, yacht racing and designing boats. He never married.
Caillebotte died in 1894, only 45 years old. He bequeathed his collection of Impressionist paintings to the French state. This provoked protests, and the state accepted only part of the works. They now form an important foundation of the collection in the Musée d'Orsay. As a painter he was long forgotten, but since the 1970s he has been regarded as one of the important artists of Impressionism.