Paintings Caillebotte, Gustave

Caillebotte, Gustave

1848 - 1894


Gustave Caillebotte Paintings Reproduction and Biography

born August 19, 1848, Paris, France
died February 21, 1894, Gennevilliers                                                             
Caillebotte was a French painter, art collector, and impresario who combined aspects of the academic and Impressionist 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 and Claude Monet in 1874 and showed his paintings at the Impressionist exhibition of 1876 and its successors. Caillebotte became the chief organizer, promoter, and financial backer of the Impressionist exhibitions for the next six years, and he used his wealth to purchase paintings 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. Most of Caillebotte paintings remained in the hands of his family and were neither exhibited nor reproduced until the second half of the 20th century. Caillebotte 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 painting, Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877), uses bold perspective to create a monumental portrait of a Paris intersection on a rainy day. Caillebotte also painted portrait paintings 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 paintings.
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 and Caillebotte paintings ever to be displayed in a French museum.