Gustave Caillebotte Prints

About Gustave Caillebotte

Gustave Caillebotte was born in Paris in August 1848, the son of a wealthy textile contractor, and trained as a lawyer before studying painting with Léon Bonnat and entering the École des Beaux-Arts in 1873. The Floor Scrapers of 1875, three workmen planing a parquet floor in raking light, was rejected by the Salon, and he showed it instead at the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876, with eight paintings in all. Paris Street; Rainy Day of 1877, a near life-size view of a new boulevard intersection under umbrellas, is his best-known work and has hung in the Art Institute of Chicago since 1964. His viewpoint was steeper and his finish smoother than his friends', closer to photography than to Monet, and he painted the family estate at Yerres, the Pont de l'Europe and his own apartment windows. Independently wealthy, he bought his colleagues' pictures and funded their exhibitions; the bequest of his collection to the French state, sixty-eight paintings by Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, Cézanne and others, formed the core of the national Impressionist holdings now in the Musée d'Orsay. He died at Petit-Gennevilliers in February 1894, where he had also designed and raced yachts. His pictures hang with the clarity of a plan: strong perspective, clean geometry, grey Paris light.