Art Gallery

Caillebotte, Gustave (1848 Paris - 1894 Gennevilliers, near Paris), was a French painter and a generous patron of the impressionists, whose own works, until recently, were neglected. The son of a middle-class family, Caillebotte was left a large legacy by his father, giving him lifelong independence. In 1870 he completed his law studies. He was an engineer by profession, but also attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Here he came in contact with Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, and Pierre Auguste Renoir in 1874 and helped organize the first impressionist exhibition in Paris that same year.

He found his motifs in his immediate surrounding: family, street scenes, working life, and scenes from his summer visits to Yerres, especially boat parties. In 1876 he contributed for the first time to the second Impressionist exhibition; then he financed and organized subsequent events. 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. The boulevards were painted from high vantage points and were populated with elegantly clad figures strolling with the expressionless intensity of somnambulists, as in Boulevard Vu d'en Haut (1880; private collection, Paris).

Caillebotte was generous to his needy painter friends, including Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Pissarro, buying many of their pictures and staging exhibitions of their work. In his will, made in 1883, he left his large collection of Impressionist paintings to the French nation on condition that all 67 works were to remain together in the Louvre. 

He died of a stroke in 1894, and the Institute de France scandalously refused to accept the collection on the grounds that it included works by Cézanne. It was not housed in the Louvre until 1928; today it is at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

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