Gustave Caillebotte - painter of a new Paris

Contemporary Review, June, 1996 by Muriel Julius

The Royal Academy are at last exhibiting some fifty of his paintings in an exhibition inaccurately called 'The Unknown Impressionist'. Unassuming, unselfish, undecided he may have been, but he is unknown only in this country because no one previously has bothered adequately to exhibit his work. Anyone at all interested in the art of the period would know that not only did he support and finance the Impressionists, exhibit his works in five of the Impressionist Exhibitions, but that on his death he left his marvellous collection of their works to the French State.

Caillebotte was born in 1848, the year of the Revolution which led to the abdication of Louis Philippe. Four years later the Second Empire was proclaimed under Napoleon the Third.

Caillebotte's father had made a great fortune as purveyor of heavy-duty textiles to the French armies. He built a luxurious mansion for his family at 77 rue Miromesnil in Paris, and with his spare cash, an apartment house not far away. He also owned two country properties.

Gustave had a conventional schooling and in 1870 qualified as a lawyer. That year saw the outbreak of the disastrous Franco Prussian war in which he served. Instead of practising law he turned to art, studying first with Louis Bonnat, then at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. His first submissions to the official Salon being rejected, he sought out the Impressionists, and in 1876 was invited to exhibit with them at their second Impressionist Exhibition.

Before fully embracing Impressionist techniques, Caillebotte's paintings were realist in the manner of Courbet. These are the images that are unique to him. One of his most outstanding works was Les Raboteurs du Bois - makers of parquet flooring - a subject surely unique in art. There are two versions - the larger and finer in the Musee d'Orsay, and a smaller version of two men, one planing the wood, the other sharpening his tools, painted as if from an observer standing in the doorway. At the Royal Academy they are clumsily called 'Floor Scrapers'.

From Geneva comes the huge, splendid Pont de L'Europe. This is the bridge that spans the railway tracks of the Gate St. Lazare. It is a representation of modern Paris restored, the compulsively ordered, smooth pavement and roadway replacing the memory of their all too recent removal in the making of revolutionary barricades. A critic wrote nostalgically 'I have difficulty recognising here my old and always slippery Parisian paving stones'.

The painting is dominated by the powerfully oblique image of the bolted iron bastions of the bridge. In the foreground a dog trots away and a man in a blue workman's smock - a frequent Caillebotte image - leans over the bridge in the mid-day sunshine. But it is the couple in the centre of the painting that interests us. The man is a well-dressed, rich bourgeois, the woman in a dark, pretty dress and hat shaded by the parasol she holds - a married couple perhaps? But wait - is this an example of Caillebotte's ironic social realism? The woman is some few steps behind the man. His head is inclined as if to catch her words. In mid-nineteenth century France ladies did not go out in public unaccompanied. Is she perhaps a high-class demimondaine accosting him? And what was he doing walking alone at an hour when most Frenchmen were at home eating luncheon. But this, after all, was the Paris of Beaudelaire and Emile Zola, of Victor Hugo and Flaubert.

Another innovation in Parisian city life was the cafe. The picture he painted in 1880 was perspectively one of the most elaborate and inventive of all his works. In the Cafe is dominated by a burly man with untidy features in a billycock hat leaning against a marble table. The pose reminds one immediately of Manet's supercilious lad in his unforgettable Le Dejeuner a L'Atelier painted in 1868. There is a mirror behind this burly man and through it is reflected a gentleman sitting on a banquette talking to the man seated opposite him, the dim interior pierced by the light from the open window with its striped awning.

The device of a mirror extending space is familiar from Manet's At the Bar of the Folies Bergere (Courtauld Collection), but it is interesting to note that Caillebotte's In the Cafe, painted in 1880, predates the Manet by two years.

Probably because Caillebotte had no need to sell his works, they are exceptionally autobiographical. We see his family, his friends, the food he ate, his country pursuits, his hobbies. In the rue Mirosmenil we see Madame Caillebotte, his mother, sitting in a claustrophobic room hung with rich crimson stuff, in a gilded chair covered in the same rich crimson, her head bent, reading. On the chimneypiece an elaborate clock and some decorative porcelain - a rich man's house.

In The Luncheon Madame Caillebotte sits at the head of a large table being served by her steward; her youngest son, Rene, is seated on her left. Caillebotte's own place is indicated by a plate right against the picture's foreground, making the overview more immediate. There is a proliferation of glass objects on the table (part of a service of three hundred pieces one understands) but very little food. This work could be included in a study in progress of 'estrangements as a motif in modern painting'.