Gustave Caillebotte
Gustave Caillebotte (August 19, 1848 – February 21, 1894), was a wealthy and generous French painter. Caillebotte was an engineer by profession, but also attended the Fine Arts school of Paris where he was lucky enough to study under the grandeur of Léon Bonnat. Caillebotte soon became a member and a major patron of the group of artists known as Impressionists. He was also an avid stamp collector, an architect and racer of yachts, and a highly skilled horticulturist.
Early Life and Career
Gustave Caillebotte was born to a life of privilege and wealth on August 19, 1848. The Caillebotte family belonged to the upper-class and were known a great deal in Parisian society. His father, Martial Caillebotte (1799-1874), inherited the family fortune and became the proprietor of the Caillebotte family textile industry. Martial Caillebotte also held the esteemed position of serving as judge at the Seine's Tribunal de Commerce. Martial Caillebotte was married and widowed twice in his younger years. His third marriage to Céleste Daufresne (1819-1878)resulted in a loving family with three children. Gustave was the first born son and very loved and well cared for. Following him, two other sons were born, René (1851-1876) and Martial (1853-1910).
The Caillebotte family home was located on one of the most famous streets in Paris, the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis. The family occupied a home there until 1866, when Martial decided to build a home on rue de Miromesnil in Paris. At this time, the Caillebotte family began vacationing during the summer months in the small town of Yerres. Yerres is 12 miles south of Paris, and located near a beautiful river and relaxing countryside. The beauty and serene charm of Yerres was the inspiration to Caillebotte's beginnings in drawing and painting. He found many subjects along the river, including birds, animals, trees, and flowers. Caillebotte was very prone to drawing people and his earliest paintings depict his parents and brothers and their daily domestic activities. His painting, Young Man at His Window, 1875, shows René in the family home on rue de Miromesnil; in The Orange Trees, 1878, Caillebotte painted Martial Jr. along with his cousin Zoë in the garden at Yerres, and Portraits in the Country, 1875, includes Caillebotte's mother, his aunt, cousin, and a family friend.
Even with this early inclination towards art, Caillebotte still attended school where he earned a law degree in 1868 and a license to practice law in 1870. Before he was able to truly start practicing the law, Caillebotte was drafted for the Franco-Prussian war. He served in the Garde Mationale Mobile de la Seine. After the war, Caillebotte attended the Fine Arts school of Paris and also began visiting the studio of painter Léon Bonnat, where he began to seriously study painting.
Caillebotte is known for the multiple facets of his achievements and interests. Along with studying law and art, he also was a racing yachtsman. When yachting, Caillebotte constantly looked for ways to improve his boats, working as a naval architec. He drew and built several boughts in his very own workshop that was located on SNECMA's present site. Caillebotte was reponsible for several brilliant creations in the nautical world, as well as creating several useful innovations including the silk veil, external ballast, and aerodynamic hulls. These strides in the yachting world garnered him many with international titles.
The Impressionist Movement
In 1874, Gustave Caillebotte made the acquaintance of several up and coming artists including Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, and Pierre Auguste Renoir. He loved their art and admired their talent. He was also very interested in the new style of painting that the group was introducing in Paris, a style that created a movement that became known as Impressionism. Upon meeting the artists, Caillebotte helped them to organize and fund their first major group exhibition in Paris. Caillebotte, the only one with any serious financial means, would become a main patron and supporter of the Impressionist group, as well as becoming a member with his own art. He constantly bought paintings of his friends for high prices and supported the expenses of their exhibitions for the next six years. The group expanded to include Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Alfred Sisley, and Berthe Morisot.
In 1876, with another exhibition on the rise, Caillebotte decided to showcase several of his paintings, instead of working behind the scenes. Upon the death of his father in 1874, followed by that of his mother in 1878, Caillebotte received a sizable inheritance that gave him the freedom of painting without the pressure and need to sell his work for money.
In addition to funding several exhibitions and painting, Caillebotte used his wealth to fund a variety of hobbies for which he was quite passionate. These hobbies include stamp collecting (his collection is now in the British Museum), orchid horticulture, yacht building, and textile design. He excelled at everything he tried. He even encorporated his hobbies as seen in his painting Madame Boissière Knitting, 1877, and Portrait of Madame Caillebotte, 1877, where it is thought that the women in the paintings are creating patterns that Caillebotte himself designed.
Artistic Career
The year before Caillebotte's first public exhibition with the Impressionists, he tried submitting work to the Official Salon in Paris, but was refused entry. Thus, in 1876, he entered the same painting, The Floor Scrapers in the second exhibiton of the Impressionst group and gained soem attention and appreciation for his work. This began his series of entries in the subsequent exhibitions.
Caillebotte's originality lay in his attempt to combine the careful drawing and modeling and exact tonal values advocated by the academy with the vivid colours, bold perspectives, keen sense of natural light, and unpretentious 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
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. He also shared the Impressionists' commitment to optical truth. Caillebotte painted many domestic, familial scenes, interiors, and figures in a landscape at Yerres, 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. Cropping and "zooming in," techniques which are also commonly found in Caillebotte's oeuvre, may also be the result of his interest in photography. A large number of Caillebotte's works also employ a very high vantage point, including his many balcony paintings such as Vue des toits, effet de neige, 1878 and Boulevard vu d'en haut, 1880.
Caillebotte painted some 500 works in a style often more realistic than that of his Impressionist friends. The painter will illustrate himself particularly in views of Paris streets made from high balconies, in scenes of working life, natural landscapes of gardens and parks, and in nautical scenes (on the Seine in Argenteuil and Yerres).
His great concern for a realistic painting, his colored notes, and his treatment of light make him well a great Impressionist painter whose work is original and diverse. 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 "Le Pont de l'Europe" typifies this interest in the modern urban environment, while "Floor-Scrapers" (1875) is a realistic scene of urban craftsmen busily at work. Caillebotte's masterpiece, "Paris Street; Rainy Day" (1877; Art Institute of Chicago), 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.
Death
Caillebotte's painting career slowed dramatically in the 1890s, when he stopped making large canvases and showing his work. He acquired a property at Petit Gennevilliers, on the banks of the Seine near Argenteuil, in 1881, and moved there permanently in 1888. He devoted himself to gardening and to building and racing yachts, and spent much time with his brother, Martial, and his friend Renoir, who often came to stay at Petit Gennevilliers. It is alleged by many sources that before his death, he had an affair with a much younger woman, Emilie Schlauch, but this can not be confirmed or denied based on the historical evidence that has been left to us. Caillebotte died prematurely, while working in his garden at Petit Gennevilliers in 1894 of pulmonary congestion, and was interred in the Père Lachaise Cemetery 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.
Caillebotte's Collection
In his will, Caillebotte donated a large collection to the French government. This collection included sixty-eight paintings by various artists: Camille Pissarro (nineteen), Claude Monet (fourteen), Pierre-Auguste Renoir (ten), Alfred Sisley (nine), Edgar Degas (seven), Paul Cézanne (five), and Édouard Manet (four).
At the time of Caillebotte's death, the Impressionists were still largely condemned by the art establishment in France, which was dominated by Academic art and specifically the Académie des beaux-arts. Because of this, Caillebotte realised that the cultural treasures in his collection would likely disappear into "attics" and "provincial museums." He therefore stipulated that they must be displayed in the Luxembourg Palace (devoted to the work of living artists), and then in the Louvre.
Unfortunately, the French government would not agree to these terms. In February 1896, they finally negotiated terms with Renoir, who was the will's executor, under which they took thirty-eight of the paintings to the Luxembourg. The remaining twenty-nine paintings (one was taken by Renoir in payment for his services as executor) were offered to the French government twice more, in 1904 and 1908, and were both times refused. When the government finally attempted to claim them in 1928, the bequest was repudiated by the widow of Caillebotte's son. Most of the remaining works were purchased by Albert C. Barnes, and are now held by the Barnes Foundation of Philadelphia.
Forty of Caillebotte's own works are now held by the Musée d'Orsay. His L'Homme au balcon, boulevard Haussmann, painted in 1880, sold for more than $14.3 million in 2000.
Works by Caillebotte
- The Floor Scrapers, 1875, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
- Young Man at his Window, 1875, Private Collection
- Yerres River, Effect of Rain, 1875, Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington
- The Park of the Caillebotte Property at Yerres, 1875, Private Collection
- Young Man at the Piano, 1876, Private Collection
- Le Pont de L'Europe, 1876, Musée du Petit Palais, Geneva
- Le Pont de L'Europe (Variant), 1876-1877, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth
- Portraits in the Country, 1876, Musée Baron Gérard, Bayeux
- House Painters, 1877, Private Collection
- Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877, The Art Institute of Chicago
- Rowers, 1877, Private Collection
- Portrait of Madame Martial Caillebotte, 1877, Private Collection
- Madame Boissière Knitting, 1877, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
- Rower in a Top Hat, 1877-1878, Private Collection
- The Orange Trees, 1878, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
- Interior, Woman at the Window, 1880, Private Collection
- In a Café, 1880, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen
- Nu au Divan, 1882, Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Bibliography
- Berhaut, Marie. Gustave Caillebotte: Catalogue raisonné des peintures et pastels. Paris: Wildenstein Institute, 1994.
- Broude, Norma, Ed. Gustave Caillebotte and the Fashioning of Identity in Impressionist Paris. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002.
- Distel, Anne. Gustave Caillebotte: The Unknown Impressionist. London: The Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1996.
- Varnedoe, Kirk. Gustave Caillebotte. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. ISBN 0-300-03722-8
- Wittmer, Pierre. Caillebotte and His Garden at Yerres. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1991.
External links
Template:Impressionists
- "Caillebotte, Gustave", WebMuseum, Paris, Retrieved May 31, 2007.
- Kirk Varnedoe, The Museum of Modern Art,"Gustave Caillebotte", The Artchive, Retrieved May 31, 2007.
- "Cailebotte at CGFA", CGFA, Retrieved May 31, 2007.
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