Gustave Caillebotte was more than a painter: he collected postage stamps, designed and raced yachts, cultivated rare orchids, collected Impressionist masterpieces, and organised Impressionist exhibitions. Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter presents the first comprehensive account of Caillebotte's passions and achievements, and reveals for the first time their profound impact upon his art.
Where previous studies have examined Caillebotte’s interest in working men, this book develops earlier approaches by excavating Caillebotte’s work on in its own terms, to understand what it meant to him. Caillebotte was born to an haute bourgeois milieu in which he was never entirely comfortable and so he refused the life of idle luxury that his inherited wealth afforded him. Instead, he actively sought out opportunities to work hard, and laboriously studied others hard at work. Working at a moment in which definitions of work and class were being reshaped to suit the needs of a new and fragile Republic, Caillebotte profited from their malleability to fabricate a new sense of self and make his own place in the world. Understanding Gustave Caillebotte as a worker, collector, and painter sheds new light on this idiosyncratic and innovative Impressionist.
The Caillebotte that emerges is thus more nuanced, complex, and fascinating than previous scholarship has suggested, offering readers a new reading of the artist's labor, art, and material practice in its broadest sense. As a result, the book stands as an important contribution to 19th-century art history, impressionist studies, and French social history.