The Brooklyn Rail

Impressionism has long occupied a favored place in the hearts of the museum-going public, and its enthusiastic acceptance provides an impetus for the movement’s continued curatorial and scholarly examination. Gustave Caillebotte (1848–94) has been a key beneficiary of this interest, moving from a minor player to an indispensable figure of early French modernism. Along with his three brothers, he inherited a considerable fortune from his landowning manufacturer father, freeing him from the necessity of paid work or having to sell his paintings. It also allowed him to buy the art of his fellow Impressionists, support and organize their exhibitions, and in the case of Claude Monet, pay the rent on his studio when needed.

Paris underwent great changes during Caillebotte’s years working there. Having emerged from the siege of the city and the humiliating defeat of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 as well as the violence of the Commune that followed it, the newly instituted and ultimately stable Third Republic combined economic and gradual social progress with a good deal of soul-searching about how the rebuilt society might be made vital. The earlier construction program started by Georges-Eugène Haussmann continued, and wealthy, fashionable districts were built and occupied by members of the haute bourgeoisie, like the Caillebotte family.

Abandoning a career in law, Caillebotte entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1873, acquiring the technical skills that enabled him to accurately render these new, uncrowded neighborhoods. Caillebotte’s depiction of their open and elongated spaces often combined deep perspectival views with striking closeups and idiosyncratic cropping, as in House Painters and Paris Street; Rainy Day (both 1877). Many of his paintings are about looking down at the city, often from a balcony, as in Young Man at His Window (1876), Man on a Balcony (1880), and A Traffic Island, Boulevard Haussmann (1880), or looking at an interior from an odd, raised point of view, as in Floor Scrapers (1875). Although not derived from photographs, Caillebotte’s extreme vantage points and skewed compositions echoed the new medium’s inherent distortions, especially those yielded by the commonly used wide-angle lens.

The Pont de l’Europe (1876) sets a group of figures on a sharply receding street next to the heavy, diagonally trussed iron bridge that spanned the open tracks of the Gare Saint-Lazare. Caillebotte portrays himself, dressed in the manner of his class, with hands clasped behind his back in the typical posture of a flâneur. To his left and slightly behind him, but not accompanying him (as she was in an earlier sketch) is a well-dressed woman, walking alone. The act renders her a more ambiguous figure, possibly a self-assured member of the middle class, but just as likely, a courtesan. A working-class man in a white smock leans over the bridge railing, looking at the tracks, while another workman in a dark jacket and a cap moves in the opposite direction. A soldier in the background crosses the street away from the bridge, and most intriguing of all, a dog at the bottom of the picture trots purposefully up the street, leading us directly into the scene. It’s worth noting that among the Impressionists, only the wealthy Caillebotte and Edgar Degas regularly portrayed the urban working class. While earlier artists often depicted peasants and other rural workers, it was considered vulgar and unseemly, for example, to paint sweating, grimy floor scrapers. The transgression appealed to the confident Caillebotte, who also proudly considered himself a hard-working person.

Paris Street; Rainy Day, Caillebotte’s largest painting, sets out a similarly complex architectural and social tableau. On the far right, a fashionable, nearly life-sized couple walk arm in arm, looking over their shoulders. Their legs are cut off by the bottom of the picture, and they are compositionally held in place by a thin green street lamp that neatly bisects the painting. Another man, whom we see only half of, is about to push by them on their left. The glistening, intersecting streets are populated by anonymous walkers, each cloistered under a new invention, the folding umbrella, and the whole scene is imbued with a sense of eerie silence and isolation.

Caillebotte painted a variety of contemporary subjects, especially boating and gardening, that would appeal to the upper classes and the rising bourgeoisie. The artist himself was a first-class yachtsman and boat designer, rowing and sailing at his country properties at Yerres, and Petit Gennevilliers along the Seine. Of his many boating paintings, Boating Party (ca. 1877–78) is perhaps his strongest. A city man out for a Sunday row, wearing a vest, a top hat, and a startling blue-and-white-striped shirt is pushed right up against us visually, as if we are in the boat with him. Paintings often featured Caillebotte’s well-to-do male friends like Albert Courtier, a notary whom he sometimes portrayed as the solid bourgeois that he was. But memorably, Caillebotte also depicted him in In a Café (1880), lounging against a bar table, an unfashionable bowler pushed back on his head, his shirt opened too wide, and his trousers rumpled. Contemporary observers would have immediately recognized him as a type—the obnoxious barfly. Caillebotte would also switch accepted gendered roles, for example, painting a man reading a novel on a couch and a woman reading a newspaper sitting up, or a nude man toweling off after a bath, instead of the female bather the Impressionists often made their subject. His striking Nude on a Couch (ca. 1880) is a portrayal of a tired young woman, possibly his longtime companion Charlotte Berthier. She has just taken her clothes off and has let them fall where they may. Tellingly, the indented line of her undergarment is still visible above her waist. There is no attempt to idealize her, nor to expressionistically exaggerate her flaws. She is a real, modern woman, complete with ample pubic hair and uneven skin tones. The painting is still edgy, and it is unsurprising that it was never exhibited in Caillebotte’s lifetime.

This beautifully designed exhibition benefits from years of research by co-curator Gloria Groom of the Art Institute, along with Scott Allan of the J. Paul Getty Museum, and Paul Perrin of the Musée d’Orsay, the exhibition’s two previous venues. Caillebotte’s circle of close, mostly male, non-artist friends are brought to life—who they were, where they lived, and what they wore. (Notably, a vitrine of the hats seen in the paintings is featured.) Caillebotte, though reserved, was thoroughly embedded in his social milieu. Painting His World creates an encompassing and engrossing picture of his place and a time, a compilation of family and friends, apartment interiors, and the city streets and leisure pursuits of a transformed modern Paris.