Gustave Caillebotte

Caillebotte trained as an engineer and inherited enough money that he never needed to sell a painting. He used it to buy his friends' work instead, at a point when almost nobody else would, and to fund the Impressionist exhibitions.

His own painting does not look much like theirs. Where the Impressionists dissolved edges, Caillebotte kept them: wet cobblestones in hard perspective, ironwork, balconies, floorboards, rain. The engineering training shows in compositions built on receding lines and steep viewpoints, closer to photography than to Monet.

He died at forty-five and left his collection to the French state, which accepted only part of it after an argument. What it did accept became a foundation of the national Impressionist holdings.

Biography compiled from the artist's Wikidata entity and English Wikipedia article (linked above). Work-level facts — title, date, medium, dimensions, inscriptions, provenance — come from the catalogue record of the institution holding each print, cited on the individual work. Public domain status is asserted by the holding institution; Australian copyright independently verified as life + 70 years from the artist's Wikidata death date. Wikipedia ↗