 |
| c1879-80 Self Portrait with an Easel oil on canvas 90 x 115 cm Private Collection |
Gustave Caillebotte was an influential French painter best known for his involvement in the Impressionist movement, though he also notably subscribed to a Realist aesthetic. The more naturalistic hues, neutral tones, and attention to perspectival space in his works set him apart from other Impressionist painters. As an artist familiar with Japanese prints, Caillebotte often mimicked the style of ukiyo-e artists by utilizing a tilted perspective to depict the stretching boulevards and river scenes of Paris, such as in Paris Street, Rainy Day (1877). Born on August 19, 1848 in Paris, France to a wealthy family, the artist went on to study painting first with Léon Joseph Florentine Bonnat and then at the École des Beaux-Arts. After Caillebotte inherited money from his parents, he was able to not only fund his own career but support Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissaro and other artists by purchasing their work. Caillebotte’s work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, among others. He died on February 21, 1894 in Gennevilliers, France.
For earlier works, and for more biographical information, see parts 1 & 2 also.
This is part 3 of a 5-part series on the works of Gustave Caillebotte:
1880 Game of Bezique:
Eponymously depicts a bezique or bésigue contest; bezique being a 19th-century French melding and trick-taking card game for two players. It was displayed at the seventh Impressionist exhibition in 1882 and ran first in the catalogue. Caillebotte set this depiction of his friends in the luxurious apartment on Boulevard Haussmann on that he shared with his brother, the composer Martial Caillbotte, who is depicted in the picture smoking a pipe.
 |
| 1880 Game of Bezique oil on canvas 121 x 161 cm Louvre Abu Dhabi, UAE |
 |
| 1880 Cliffs in Normandy oil on canvas 73 x 60 cm Private Collection |
 |
| 1880 Boulevard Haussmann, effect of snow oil on canvas 81 x 66 cm cm Musée du château de Flers, Orne |
 |
| 1880 Boulevard from above oil on canvas 65 x 54 cm Private Collection |
 |
| 1880 Nude on a Couch oil on canvas 129.5 x 194.6 cm Minneapolis Institute of Arts, MN |
 |
| 1880 Marine, Regatta at Villers oil on canvas 73.4 x 100 cm |
 |
| 1880 Interior, woman reading oil on canvas 65 x 81 cm Private Collection |
 |
| 1880 Interior oil on canvas 116 x 89 cm |
 |
| 1880 Villas at Villers-sur-Mer oil on canvas 64.8 x 81.3 cm |
 |
| 1880 View through a balcony oil on canvas 65.6 x 54.9 cm Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam |
 |
| 1880 Man on a balcony, Boulevard Haussmann oil on canvas 116.5 x 89.5 cm Private Collection |
1880 Portrait of a Man:
Among Gustave Caillebotte’s most celebrated works are his views of modern Paris seen from balconies and terraces, a theme that first appeared in his paintings of the mid-1870s. This painting depicts a middle-aged man sitting in room and looking toward a window with laced curtains. His fashionable suit and bow tie are markers of his social status as a flâneur of the urban bourgeoisie. Rather than wearing an expression of joy or delight, the sunlight raking across his face accentuates his heavily lidded eyes and sagging facial muscles, giving him a deeply contemplative expression as he gazes at the world from the comfort of his sumptuous apartment.
The Cleveland Museum of Art, OH
 |
| 1880 Portrait of a Man oil on canvas 81.3 x 65.6 cm The Cleveland Museum of Art, OH |
 |
| 1880 View of the sea, Villerville oil on canvas 54 x 65 cm |
 |
| c1880-81 Cliff in Normandy oil on canvas 73 x 60 cm Private Collection |
 |
| c1880 Boulevard Haussmann, snow oil on canvas 65 x 82 cm Private Collection |
 |
| c1880 Boulevard des Italiens oil on canvas 54 x 65 cm Private Collection |
 |
| c1880 Cliffs in Normandy oil on canvas 73 x 60 cm |
 |
| c1880 Cliff at Villers sur Mer oil on canvas (dimensions not found) Private Collection |
 |
| c1880 Traffic island on Boulevard Haussmann oil on canvas 81 x 101 cm Private Collection |
 |
| c1880 Three partridges on a table oil on canvas (dimensions not found) Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, WI |
 |
| c1880 Man on a balcony oil on canvas 116 x 97 cm Private Collection |
1880-81 A Balcony in Paris: This painting is one of several by Caillebotte in which an urban street, viewed from a balcony, is seen through the spaces of an ornate iron grill in the foreground, differentiating the space of the street from the interior of his bourgeois home, 31 Boulevard Haussmann in Paris. The motif may have been inspired by similar juxtapositions seen in many Japanese ukiyo-e prints.
 |
| 1880-81 A Balcony in Paris oil on canvas 55.2 x 39 cm Private Collection |
 |
| c1880-82 Still life with crayfish oil on canvas 58 x 72 cm Private Collection |
 |
| 1880-82 Melon and bowl of figs oil on canvas (dimensions not found) Private Collection |
 |
| 1881 Still life: Oysters oil on canvas 38 x 55 cm Private Collection |
 |
| 1881 Rising Road oil on canvas 100 x 125 cm Private Collection |
 |
| 1881 Portrait of a Man oil on canvas 45.7 x 38.1 cm |
 |
| 1881 Pastry Cakes oil on canvas 54 x 73 cm |
1881 Young Peasant Having Her Coffee:
In the 1880s, at a time when many of the original Impressionist painters had begun to pursue independent styles, Camille Pissarro actively worked to keep the group together. He persuaded Gustave Caillebotte and Claude Monet to take part in the seventh Impressionist exhibition, in 1882, and also displayed a number of his own paintings of peasant girls. Here the small brushstrokes, applied one next to the other and sometimes overlaid with dabs of thicker paint, result in an irregularly built-up surface, serving to integrate figure and setting and evoke the textures of the young woman’s wool clothing.
Art Institute of Chicago, IL
 |
| 1881 Young peasant having her coffee oil on canvas 65.3 x 54.8 cm charcoal, on tan paper 30.2 x 46.5 cm Art Institute of Chicago, IL |
 |
| 1881 The piano lesson oil on canvas 81 x 65 cm Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris |
 |
| c1881 A soldier oil on canvas 196 x 75 cm Private Collection |
 |
| c1881-82 Hors d'Oeuvre oil on canvas 25 x 55 cm Private Collection |
 |
| 1881-82 Fruit Displayed on a Stand oil on canvas 76.5 x 100.6 cm Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA |
 |
| 1882 Red mullet oil on canvas 38 x 55.2 cm |
 |
| 1882 Hare oil on canvas 89 x 35 cm Petit Palais, Geneva |
 |
| 1882 Two Hanging Pheasants oil on canvas 73 x 54 cm Private Collection |
 |
| 1882 Tree in Flower oil on canvas 82 x 66 cm Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
 |
| 1882 The Seine at Argenteuil oil on canvas (details not found) |
 |
| 1882 The Beach at Trouville, View from the Corniceoil oil on canvas 60.3 x 73 cm |
 |
| 1882 The Bank and the Argenteuil Bridge oil on canvas 60 x 73 cm |
