Paris Street; Rainy Day. Gustave Caillebotte · Public domain · source

Gustave Caillebotte

Public domain1848-1894·French·painting·Wikipedia ↗

Who

Born in Paris on 19 August 1848, he died at Gennevilliers on 21 February 1894, aged 45, of pulmonary congestion, while working in his garden. A painter of the new Paris of the boulevards - its streets, balconies, interiors and working men - and, rich from his family, a collector, yachtsman and stamp collector: the stamps he collected with his brother Martial are now in the British Library.

Why they matter

He painted the rebuilt, modern Paris in steep, plunging perspectives, and he painted men - at work, at the window, in the bath - so often that the 2024-25 retrospective was built around them. The Floor Scrapers was rejected by the Salon of 1875 as a vulgar subject: working men, half-dressed, planing a floor. He was also the group's backer: he found the rooms, chose and hung the work, and bought his friends' paintings, and he showed in five of the eight Impressionist exhibitions himself.

What to buy

Prints: Paris Street; Rainy Day is the picture, and the Art Institute of Chicago, which owns it, sells matted and unmatted prints and a poster; the Getty's store also carries Caillebotte prints. Buy one of these rather than a poster-factory copy: the whole effect is the grey, even light of a wet afternoon, and a cheap print turns it muddy. Books: Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men (Getty Publications and the Art Institute of Chicago, 2024, 264 pages), the catalogue of the 2024-25 exhibition at the Musee d'Orsay, the Getty and Chicago, is the current book. The catalogue raisonne is Marie Berhaut's, revised by Sophie Pietri (Wildenstein Institute and La Bibliotheque des Arts, 1994), with the 565 paintings and pastels then known. Originals: not realistic. The major paintings are in museums, and the few left in private hands sell as museum pieces.

Notes

The Musee d'Orsay, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Getty hold the key paintings. The Floor Scrapers entered the national collection in 1894 as a gift from his heirs, arranged by Renoir as his executor. Young Man at His Window shows his brother Rene and was shown at the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876; the Getty bought it at Christie's New York in November 2021.

Story

On 3 November 1876, two days after his brother Rene died, Gustave Caillebotte, aged 28, wrote his will. He left his collection of his friends' paintings to the French state, on one condition: they must really be exhibited, first at the Musee du Luxembourg and then at the Louvre, and not put in storage or sent to a provincial museum.

He died in February 1894, at 45. His executor, Renoir, told the director of Fine Arts that the collection was the state's: about seventy works, by Degas, Manet, Cezanne, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley and others. The state did not want them all. It took two years of bargaining with Renoir and Caillebotte's brother Martial before a compromise was signed in February 1896: the state would take a selection, forty works, and hang all of them.

The counting is telling. All seven Degas were accepted. Only two of the five Cezannes, eight of the sixteen Monets and seven of the eighteen Pissarros. The thirty refused works went to Martial, and his heirs sold them off around the world. The Caillebotte room opened at the Luxembourg in February 1897 - the first presentation of the Impressionists in a public venue in France. From there the forty moved to the Louvre in 1929, to the Jeu de Paume in 1947, and in 1986 to the Musee d'Orsay, which holds them today.

Key works

The Floor Scrapers (Les raboteurs de parquet) (1875) - Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Young Man at His Window (1876) - J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877) - Art Institute of Chicago

Gustave Caillebotte

Who

Why they matter

What to buy

Notes

Story

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

Prints

Books

See also