Gustave Caillebotte

(1848-1894)

French painter and a generous patron of the impressionists, whose own works, until recently, were neglected.

Gustave Caillebotte was born in 1848 to a wealthy family who had made their money in textiles and real estate during the redevelopment of Paris in the 1860s.

In 1875, wishing to make his public debut, he submitted a painting to the Salon jury, which rejected it. That work was probably the Floorscrapers, which Caillebotte then decided to exhibit in a more hospitable environment, that of the second Impressionist group exhibition of 1876. His work, highly acclaimed, stole the show and helped to make the second exhibition far more of a popular success than the first.

Wealthy and generous, Caillebotte financially supported his Impressionist friends by purchasing their works at inflated prices and underwriting many of the expenses incurred for the exhibitions.

Caillebotte was a painter of great originality. Like the Impressionists, Caillebotte pursued an instant of vision, recording it with a fullness of truthful detail. Caillebotte, however, attempted to portray the rhythms of an industrial society with his regimented figures and the clock-like precision of his Paris. In this aspect, he was very much like the Realists.

In 1876 he drew up a will providing money for an Impressionist exhibition to be held after his death, and bequeathing his collection of Impressionist paintings to the State. This bequest was made on the condition that the paintings should first be exhibited in the Luxembourg (the museum dedicated to the work of living artists), and later to the Louvre. He intended that the State should not hide the paintings away in an attic or provincial museum. His brother Martial along with Renoir were entrusted with making sure the provisions of his will were carried out.

Gustave Caillebotte died in 1894.

Caillebotte: The Unknown Impressionist
Royal Academy, 28 March - 26 June 1996

Out of the unknown
Caillebotte is that great rarity - a neglected Impressionist. Richard Dorment explains why

Like most myths, the one about the Impressionists starving in their garrets while waiting for recognition is at best only partially true. Manet and Morisot, Degas and Mary Cassatt all came from prosperous upper middle-class families, while Toulouse-Lautrec was an aristocrat and Cezanne's father a nouveau riche. They could all afford to experiment with new ways of painting for the simple reason that they didn't have to sell their pictures to earn a living.

Gustave Caillebotte, whom the subtitle of the Royal Academy's Spring exhibition dubs the "The Unknown Impressionist", is another case in point. The large private income that enabled him to bequeath his incredible collection of Impressionist pictures to the Louvre also allowed him to treat painting as another gentlemanly pursuit, along with stamp-collecting, gardening, architecture and rowing - in each of which he effortlessly excelled. And yet at his best Caillebotte is a more original artist than the label of gentleman-amateur implies. The years when he was actively exhibiting before his early death (in 1894, aged 45) coincide with the age we feel we know through Impressionist depictions of ballet and boulevard, racecourse and seaside. What is odd about Caillebotte is that his pictures often show an edgy, out-of-joint world, a world in which the sweetness of life is curiously absent, and where material comfort seems only to increase social and psychological tension. Here's an example. In the 1870s, progressive artists had no difficulty in showing the city of Paris as a place of parks and flowers, chestnut trees and beautiful buildings.

But in 1876 Caillebotte sent to the second Impressionist exhibition his picture Le Pont de l'Europe. It shows a newly constructed bridge over a railway in a treeless part of the city near the Gare St Lazare, its deep and startling perspective serving to emphasise the rigid geometry of Baron Haussmann's city plan. The long straight lines and iron barrier seem to channel the men and women crossing the bridge into a pre-ordained groove.

In the work of Degas or Manet, we could identify the bearded man in top hat and frock coat walking towards us as a flaneur, or man of leisure. But the whole point of Caillebotte's picture is that the man is nothing of the sort. This is a businessman hurrying from the station to his morning's work, perhaps on the Bourse, so intent on getting there in time that he overtakes an elegantly dressed widow without pausing to remove his hat. The man represents a new breed of bourgeoisie, one as single-minded in its pursuit of money as the mongrel who comes trotting behind his master from the other direction. His opposite number, the labourer leaning on the parapet, idly watches the trains shunting into the station below. The long blue shadows that tell us it is early morning also suggest that this fellow has nothing to do, is unemployed. The man's smock identifies him as a member of the working classes whom Haussmann's urban development drove out of central Paris. Caillebotte depicts a city that would have interested the Futurists, a place of dynamic intersections and personal anonymity, where human relationships count for nothing.

In a Traffic Island, Boulevard Haussmann of 1880 we look at a bird's-eye view of a perfect circle, just after noon on a hot summer's day, when few people have ventured on to the streets. The traffic island is empty apart from two men dressed in black frock coats, tiny specks poised on opposite sides of its perimeter, like two hands on a giant clock. Caillebotte shows a city where isolation and alienation is the norm, and where a sense of community hardly exists. And what is true of his cityscapes is true of his genre and portraiture.

In The Luncheon, Caillebotte shows his mother and younger brother in the heavily curtained dining-room of the family's haute bourgeois Paris flat. It takes a moment in front of the picture to figure out why it is so depressing. Caillebotte has tilted the dark table upwards, pushing his widowed mother towards the top of the picture to emphasise the emotional as well as the physical distance that separates her from the empty place-setting at the bottom of the table - presumably the artist's own.

Meanwhile, his brother rudely begins to wolf down his lunch before his mother has been served. That the house is beautifully run we know from the rigid arrangements of cut-glass decanters and goblets in the centre of the polished table. But we can be sure that mother and son will not speak to each other during the meal.

I don't mean to imply that Caillebotte is painting's answer to Ibsen, for there are plenty of pleasant pictures of gardens and flowers in the Royal Academy show. Over and over again he surprises us with the novelty of a subject (a male nude towelling himself after a bath: as far as I know a theme unique in art before the 20th century) or his viewpoint (two rowers seen from the front and from below as they bend over their oars).

But why, if Caillebotte's is such an original voice, is he not better known? The answer is that he painted only about a dozen pictures that remotely come up to scratch. At his best, he was dazzling. But most of the time he was nothing more than a superior illustrator. Pictures that look wonderful in reproduction are consistently disappointing on the gallery wall. While he had an eye for unusual shapes, and a sensibility attuned to psychologically fraught situations, he didn't have the ability to make ordinary things beautiful simply by the way he painted them.

Looking at his still lifes showing a side of beef or dead rabbit, we instinctively compare them to works by Rembrandt and Chardin - and instantly see how turgidly painted their surfaces are. Whereas Manet could turn a few stalks of asparagus into a work of transcendant beauty, Caillebotte's real talent was for observation and narration, not painting. But Caillebotte possesses one quality that confers on him near mystical status in the 1990s: he was an Impressionist. No reservations about his artistic competence, nor even the absence of some of his most famous pictures from this show, is going to prevent a public stampede.

'Caillebotte: The Unknown Impressionist' is at the Royal Academy until June 23 (sponsored by Societe Generale).