Gustave Caillebotte

1848-1894 • French • Painter • Realist / Impressionist

"I am always very happy to see you but I cannot say for sure that I won't be in the country shortly. Several times now I've come down to leave and the moment I reach the bottom of the stairs the rain begins again. This weather is really vile." - Caillebotte

Caillebotte exhibited with the IMPRESSIONISTS, collected their works, and shared some of their interests-the wide boulevards of modern Paris, for example. Paris Street: Rainy Weather (1877) catches the sensations of an instant in which wet, gray cobblestones, side walk, and umbrellas reflect the ambient light, and fashionable people, singly and in couples, hurry along in their private, umbrella-sheltered worlds to wherever they may be going. Judging from the excerpt of a letter he wrote to PISSARRO in 1879, quoted from above, one effect the rain had on Caillebotte was to make him long for the sunny countryside. Shared topics aside, Caillebotte's painting technique is more polished than that of other Impressionists. In The Floor scrapers (1875)-a subject that allies him with REALISM Caillebotte has chosen an unusual theme: three men finishing the wood floors of what seems to be a chic Paris apartment (these may be Caillebotte's own rooms). He examines this labor intensive scene from an odd angle that makes the parallel floorboards slant sharply, reminiscent of the Japanese prints that fascinated Impressionists (see UKIYO-E). This seems both an interest in the urbanization of labor-yet hardly industrialization-and a contemplation of human collaboration, as the men work in tandem. The historian Robert Rosenblum astutely links this scene with paintings EAKINS made of men rowing together (e.g., The Big ten Brothers Turning at the Stake, 1873). The two Caillebotte paintings discussed above secure the painter a place as an innovator in the 19th century. His own Impressionist art collection, bequeathed to the state and accepted only over the protest of most ECOLEDES BEAUX-ARTS teachers, cast him as provocateur, causing an up roar when it was exhibited in 1897.