“Gustave Caillebotte: Impressionist Paintings from Paris to the Sea”

Brooklyn Museum, through July 5

1. Self-Portrait at the Easel, 1979
Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894) was perhaps the least familiar of the French painters who revolutionized the medium in the mid-19th century, but he was an ardent supporter as well as a member of the Société Anonyme des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, etc., the group that became known as the Impressionists. Although he wasn’t included in their very first show in 1874, he participated in the next one two years later, and those thereafter. He was also a patron of the group, using his family inheritance to buy up works by Manet, Renoir, Monet, Degas and Cézanne, which he later donated to the state. These became the core of the collection now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

Caillebotte was born into a wealthy bourgeois family in the revolutionary year of 1848. He grew up in Paris, pursued a law degree and spent some time in the military before entering France’s famed l’École des Beaux-Arts, where he briefly studied painting before falling in with the Impressionists.

2. The Floor Scrapers, 1876
In the beginning, Caillebotte’s style was quite distinct from his fellow Impressionists. He eschewed pure color and piecemeal brushwork, and for a while it seemed that he still owed a lot to the academic approach taught in l’École. But what distinguished Caillebotte almost immediately as a thoroughly modern painter was his use of forced perspective and his subject matter. He often focused on members of the working class, as he does here in this scene of floor refinishers laboring in his family’s apartment. There’s nothing idealized or sentimentalized about these men; they’re not even particularly individualized. Instead, they’re pictured anonymously, as fixtures of urban life.

3. The Pont de l'Europe, Sketch, 1876
Caillebotte’s true subject was the city itself—the “new” Paris created by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann between 1852 and 1870 during the reign of Napolean III. Under Haussmann’s direction, the warren of narrow streets and alleyways that had bounded Parisian life since Medieval times was leveled to make way for sweeping boulevards and block after block of stately buildings and monuments. While we take this Paris for granted, at the time, Haussmann’s renovations were nothing short of radical—futuristic, even. It is this sense of futurism that creeps its way into images like Caillebotte’s sketch of the railroad bridge leading into the Gare Saint-Lazare train station; both structures were considered technological marvels at the time. Using perspective to emphasize the thrust of the iron trusswork, Caillebotte evokes the dynamism of modern urban life, and the breakdown of class barriers suggested by the bourgeois couple (the man is Caillebotte himself) passing a workman idling on the overpass.

4. The House Painters, 1877
Victor Hugo once joked about Haussmann’s grand avenues that one could see all the way from Pantin to Grenelle—two neighborhoods located across town from one another. In the relentless march of Haussmann’s streets, there were glimmers of both the utopian hopes of the 20th century and the totalitarian reality to come, and nowhere in Caillebotte’s work are the hints of that future more evident than in this composition. Beyond the irony of the artist portraying fellow painters—albeit on the opposite end of the social structure from himself—there’s the strangely unnerving sense of the whole scene being sucked, black hole–style, towards the canvas’s vanishing point.

5. Oarsmen Rowing on the Yerres, 1877
Caillebotte painted in the countryside as well as in city. His family owned an estate near the town of Yerres, which shared its name with the river flowing through it. Caillebotte was an avid boater, and, indeed, rowing and yachting were all the rage in 1870s France (a vogue brought over from England). Interestingly, Caillebotte often applied the same sort of spatial dynamics to his rural-themed paintings that he did to his depictions of the “new” Paris. In this closely cropped composition of two men out on the river, one gets the sense of a stationary camera, focused on water, when suddenly the rowers hove into view.

6. Oarsman in a Top Hat, 1877–1878
That same feeling of cinematography is evident in this view of a boater wearing a black top hat. This bit of haberdashery adds to the strangely monumental presence of the figure set against an otherwise bucolic vista, making him seem more machine than man. Indeed, when Caillebotte unveiled the canvas to the public, the satiric Parisian periodical Le Charivari caricatured the image in a cartoon captioned, “Scene with a boat…under steam,” complete with smoke chugging out of the topper.

7. A Traffic Island, Boulevard Haussmann, 1880
Still, it was the city that provided Caillebotte the closest congruence of content and form. Although Manet, Monet, Degas and Renoir all used Paris as inspiration, Caillebotte alone focused on the effect that the urban fabric itself had on perception—the fact, for instance, that views like this one could only be afforded by buildings that were ten stories or higher. Such scenes became commonplace with the continued development of the modern metropolis, but they were still something radically new in Caillebotte’s day. It’s one reason why, of the great Impressionists, he seems the most contemporary to our.