- Caillebotte, Gustave
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born Aug. 19, 1848, Paris, Fr.died Feb. 21, 1894, GennevilliersFrench painter and art collector.Born to a wealthy family, he was a naval architect by profession. He pursued his interest in painting at the École des Beaux-Arts and became a prolific painter of contemporary subjects, town and country views, still lifes, and boating scenes. In Caillebotte's masterpiece, Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877), he used bold perspective to create a monumental portrait of a Paris intersection. In addition to his own painting, Caillebotte was the chief organizer, promoter, and financial backer of the Impressionist exhibitions, and he purchased works by Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, and others. He bequeathed his collection to the state, and in 1897 it formed the basis of the first Impressionist exhibition in a French museum. See Impressionism.
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▪ French painterborn August 19, 1848, Paris, Francedied February 21, 1894, GennevilliersFrench painter, art collector, and impresario who combined aspects of the academic and Impressionist (Impressionism) styles in a unique synthesis.Born into a wealthy family, Caillebotte trained to be an engineer but became interested in painting and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He met Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Renoir, Pierre-Auguste) and Claude Monet (Monet, Claude) in 1874 and showed his works at the Impressionist exhibition of 1876 and its successors. Caillebotte became the chief organizer, promoter, and financial backer of the Impressionist (Impressionism) exhibitions for the next six years, and he used his wealth to purchase works by other Impressionists, notably Monet, Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, and Berthe Morisot.Caillebotte was an artist of remarkable abilities, but his posthumous reputation languished because most of his paintings remained in the hands of his family and were neither exhibited nor reproduced until the second half of the 20th century. His early paintings feature the broad new boulevards and modern apartment blocks created by Baron Haussmann for Paris in the 1850s and '60s. The iron bridge depicted in The Pont de l'Europe (1876) typifies this interest in the modern urban environment, while The Parquet Floor Polishers (1875) is a realistic scene of urban craftsmen busily at work. Caillebotte's masterpiece, Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877), uses bold perspective to create a monumental portrait of a Paris intersection on a rainy day. Caillebotte also painted portraits and figure studies, boating scenes and rural landscapes, and decorative studies of flowers. He tended to use brighter colours and heavier brushwork in his later works.Caillebotte's originality lay in his attempt to combine the careful drawing and modeling and exact tonal values advocated by the Académie with the vivid colours, bold perspectives, keen sense of natural light, and modern subject matter of the Impressionists. Caillebotte's posthumous bequest of his art collection to the French government was accepted only reluctantly by the state. When the Caillebotte Room opened at the Luxembourg Palace in 1897, it was the first exhibition of Impressionist paintings ever to be displayed in a French museum.Additional ReadingMarie Berhaut and Sophie Pietri, Gustave Caillebotte: Catalogue Raisonné des peintures et pastels, new ed. rev. and enlarged (1994); Anne Distel et al., Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist (1995).* * *
Universalium. 2010.
