Parisian perspectives

In 1879, two young brothers moved into a new fifth-floor apartment at no. 31 Boulevard Haussmann, overlooking the Opéra. Flush with inheritances from their father’s army bunk business, Gustave Caillebotte, 31, and his brother Martial, 26, were exactly the sort of children of the Second Empire for whom these new Parisian mansion blocks had been built.

In 1879, two young brothers moved into a new fifth-floor apartment at no. 31 Boulevard Haussmann, overlooking the Opéra. Flush with inheritances from their father’s army bunk business, Gustave Caillebotte, 31, and his brother Martial, 26, were exactly the sort of children of the Second Empire for whom these new Parisian mansion blocks had been built.

In some ways, though, the brothers were atypical of their leisured class, for they were both exceptionally — in Gustave’s case furiously — industrious. Alongside shared passions for stamp collecting and yachting, Martial studied at the Conservatoire and became a composer, while Gustave, after attending the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, threw in his lot with the Impressionists. He bought their paintings, subsidised their exhibitions and mended fences between artistic factions. The critic Duranty went so far as to say that without him Impressionism wouldn’t have happened, and it’s certainly true that the Caillebotte Bequest, forced on a reluctant French State by his executor Renoir, forms the core of the Musée d’Orsay’s Impressionist collection. One of its highlights, Renoir’s ‘Bal du Moulin de la Galette’, appears in the ‘Self-portrait with an Easel’ Caillebotte painted just after his move to the Boulevard Haussmann.

For nearly a century, this was the legacy he was remembered for. Of the 500-odd paintings he produced before his death aged 45 from pulmonary congestion, most remained in his family. Unlike his fellow Impressionists he had no need to sell work, and this freedom could explain the sense of detachment that strikes us today as startlingly modern.