Caillebotte, Gustave (1848-1894) , French painter and art collector, known for scenes of contemporary urban life in France, especially of upper-middle-class life in Paris. As a collector he supported the impressionist painters, with whom he also exhibited. Caillebotte portrayed people without sentimentality, despite using members of his family as models for many paintings. Luncheon (1876, private collection, Paris) presents a precise observation of his brother eating while a decorous servant waits on his mother. In Paris Street: Rainy Weather (1877, Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois) he captured the movements of pedestrians and the extraordinary perspectives created by the city’s smart new boulevards as they converge.

Many of Caillebotte’s paintings employ strikingly unconventional viewpoints; for example, in his ambitiously modern interior scene, Floor Scrapers (1875, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), the viewer looks down at such a steep angle that only the bottom third of the window is visible. Caillebotte’s depiction endowed the subjects of this painting—three shirtless, straining laborers—with a heroic quality. He submitted Floor Scrapers to the official government exhibition called the Salon, but the judges rejected it, doubtless for the strangeness of its viewpoint and for the vulgarity of its subject. He subsequently began to show his work with the impressionists, who shared his interest in depicting realistic scenes of modern life. He became one of the core members of this group, organized the impressionist exhibit of 1877, and participated in the exhibitions of 1876, 1879, 1880, and 1882.

Caillebotte had begun to study painting in 1872 in the Paris studio of Léon Bonnat, having first earned a law degree in 1870. In 1873 he gained entrance to the French École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts), but he attended few classes there. He turned away from his early painting technique—with its smooth surfaces and somber colors—after meeting the impressionists. Caillebotte’s arresting, truncated compositions owe a debt to impressionist painter Edgar Degas, who also chose unusual angles and compositions in which the edge of the painting cuts off the subject in the seemingly haphazard manner of a snapshot.

The detailed objectivity of Caillebotte’s vision and his insistence on modern subject matter probably reflect the influence of naturalism, a contemporary movement in literature that shared those principles. In later years he began to paint riverside scenes, using a brighter palette and small, broken brushstrokes that resembled those of impressionist painter Claude Monet.

Because he was born into a prosperous family, Caillebotte had no need to sell his pictures. On the contrary, he could afford to help his impressionist colleagues by buying their works. In 1894 he donated his collection of impressionist masterpieces to the French government, whereupon conservatives condemned the gift as a dishonor to French art. These very paintings are now the pride of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Today, after a period of neglect, Caillebotte’s own artistic effort has also found renewed favor with critics and the public.