Gustave Caillebotte

Painter of modern Paris — rain-soaked boulevards, vertiginous perspectives, bourgeois interiors and working men — and one of the Impressionist movement's indispensable organizers and patrons. Caillebotte was independently wealthy through his family's fabric manufacturing business, and he used that wealth systematically: he funded exhibitions, paid Monet's rent when things were difficult, and purchased works by his friends that no one else would buy. The collection he assembled and bequeathed to the French state at his death in 1894 — initially met with resistance from the conservative administration of the Beaux-Arts — became the foundation of the Impressionist holdings now at the Musée d'Orsay. His own painting has a character distinct from the rest of the movement. Where Monet and Renoir dissolved form in light, Caillebotte kept it architectural: his Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877) lays out Haussmann's new boulevards with almost engineering-precision in perspective, and his floor-scrapers and house painters are treated with a directness and physical dignity that his colleagues rarely applied to working-class labor. He was also an avid photographer and sailor, and his compositions reflect both — cropped like photographs, attentive to the structures of physical effort. Caillebotte died of pulmonary congestion at forty-five, before the recognition that has since come. For much of the 20th century he was known mainly as a collector rather than a painter. Only in the 1970s and 1980s did major retrospectives begin to establish him as a painter of genuine originality, and his prices at auction have risen accordingly.