Gustave Caillebotte

Artist: Caillebotte, Gustave

Gustave Caillebotte
Gustave Caillebotte
Gustave Caillebotte
Gustave Caillebotte

Movement(s): Impressionism, Realism

Gustave Caillebotte (1848 – 1894) was a French painter who was a member and patron of the Impressionists, although he painted in a more realistic manner than many others in the group. Caillebotte was known for his early interest in photography as an art form.

Gustave Caillebotte was born to an upper-class Parisian family living in the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis. His father, Martial Caillebotte, was the inheritor of the family’s military textile business and was also a judge at the Tribunal de commerce de la Seine. Caillebotte’s father was twice widowed before marrying Caillebotte’s mother, Celeste Daufresne, who had two more sons after Gustave: Rene and Martial.

Caillebotte earned a law degree in 1868 and a license to practice law in 1870, and he also was an engineer. Shortly after his education, he was drafted to fight in the Franco-Prussian war, and served from July 1870 to March 1871 in the Garde Nationale Mobile de la Seine.

After the war, Caillebotte began visiting the studio of painter Leon Bonnat, where he began to study painting seriously. He developed an accomplished style in a relatively short time and had his first studio in his parents’ home. In 1873, Caillebotte entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but apparently did not spend much time there. He inherited his father’s fortune in 1874 and the surviving sons divided the family fortune after their mother’s death in 1878. Gustave and his brother sold the Yerres estate and moved into an apartment in the Boulevard Haussmann in Paris.

In common with his precursors Jean-Francois Millet and Gustave Courbet, as well his contemporary Degas, Caillebotte aimed to paint reality as it existed and as he saw it, hoping to reduce the inherent theatricality of painting. Perhaps because of his close relationship with so many of his peers, his style and technique vary considerably among his works, as if “borrowing” and experimenting, but not really sticking to any one style. At times, he seems very much in the Degas camp of rich-colored realism (especially his interior scenes); at other times, he shares the Impressionist commitment to “optical truth” and employs an impressionistic pastel-softness and loose brush strokes most similar to Renoir and Camille Pissarro, although with a less vibrant palette.

Click here to read Caillebotte’s full bio on Wikipedia.

Here are the places we have found where Caillebotte painted in France (a link “⇠” will appear next to a place when we have published his works for that particular place);

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