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Gustave Caillebotte
(Aug. 19, 1848 Paris - Feb. 21, 1894 Paris) French oil painting artist biography.
Gustave Caillebotte was born into a wealthy family, he was an engineer by profession, but also attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He met Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Pierre Auguste Renoir in 1874 and helped organize the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris that same year. Although he participated in many Impressionist exhibitions, he was noted mainly as an art collector and a patron of Impressionist artists. He not only financed Impressionist exhibitions, he introduced Impressionism to French museums by bequeathing 40 masterpieces from his art collection. 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 works by Monet, Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley. He participated in later shows and painted some 500 works in a more realistic style than that of his friends.
Caillebotte's most intriguing paintings are those of the broad, new Parisian boulevards. 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 colors, bold perspectives, keen sense of natural light and unpretentious subject matter of the Impressionists. His early oil paintings feature the broad new boulevards and modern apartment blocks created by Baron Haussmann for Paris in the 1850s and '60s. As a result of a increasing bourgeoisie, Baron Georges Haussmann changed the face of the city by tearing up old Parisian quarters and installing new boulevards, buildings, bridges. Paralleling Realist writers, mid 19th century artists took their cues from the influential poet Baudelaire who urged them to embrace the modern aesthetic by opening their eyes to the contemporary scene. It meant breaking with the French Academic School whose formal traditions were dedicated to glorifying the noble and the ideal in classical styles.
Street scenes, viewed from Caillebotte's apartment on Boulevard Haussmann, have daring plunging views and often appear empty and silent, as if drained of the reality of an urban metropolis. Caillebotte's exaggerated perspectives and bleached light expose a harsher new city with balcony views incorporating interiors and exteriors. Impressionists, for the most part, used it as a device to depict the penetration of light in a room. Caillebotte's balcony views, however, emphasized the psychological contrasts between the interior and the exterior world.
Modern artists, also influenced by new scientific theories of color, by contemporary photography and by the dramatic perspectives of Japanese prints, set about to destroy Renaissance ideas of composition and space. One such method consisted of cropping the pictorial surface to evoke fragments of reality. When Caillebotte presented Floor Scrapers at an Impressionist exhibition, his bold perspective and virtuoso tonal control was considered vulgar and was greeted with scorn by the traditionalists. Painted in shades of brown, beige and gray, it's ocher-based golden highlights heightened the intensity of the workers. Today, the oil painting is considered a major work of art of the period and the depiction day laborers maintains its relevancy in our own time.
The iron bridge depicted in Le Pont de l'Europe typifies this interest in the modern urban environment. Caillebotte's masterpiece, remaining true to modern Realist principles, incorporated into his works the psychological effects of new environments on individual lives, particularly the sense of isolation and the effects of idleness on a new economic class. Paris Street: Rainy Day (1877, Art Institute of Chicago) evokes the orderly rectangles and star-burst intersections that epitomized Paris' streets. In the foreground, a couple sharing an umbrella do not relate to each other, but look off into the distance. Executed in muted shades of gray and beige, the street is sparsely populated and the areas of empty space add to a sense of detachment and 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, rural landscapes and decorative studies of flowers. He tended to use brighter colors and heavier brushwork in his later works.
Caillebotte died prematurely, while working in his garden at Petit Gennevilliers in 1894 of pulmonary congestion at the age of 45. 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, thus cementing his stature as one of the great worlds artist. Gustave 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 not exhibited nor reproduced until the late 1970's.
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Paris Street: Rainy Day
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Le Pont de l'Europe
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A Balcony
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Oarsmen
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Floor Scrapers
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