Paintings from his last years

With the paintings that the artist completed in the last stage of his life we can see how his style changed from realism in the Paris Street; Rainy Day to a more free style like his friends the Impressionists. I must note that his realistic paintings were absent of any moralizing. But his training as a lawyer and engineer still comes through; he remains constantly a conceptual artist.

One of the delights of complex art is the difference in interpretation such art elicits from different audiences. For example feminist art historian Norma Broude thinks that Caillebotte is signaling, in his Le Pont de l'Europe painting, his own homosexuality with a "queer gaze".  Caillebotte, she says, is an upper-class man cruising for a lower-class male prostitute in this unsavory neighborhood of Paris. Of course, the woman with him is a prostitute. The tall hat and cane show a compensation for a diminished sex drive of French males after loosing the Franco-Prussian War. This take seems to tell us more about the reviewer than the painting.

On the other hand, the New York Times reviewer of a Caillebotte exhibition in Brooklyn thinks, "The newly rich and the perpetually poor share public space, but without an exchange of word or glance."  This might be true, but Parisians are not known for chatting with strangers on the street.

 Analysis and deconstruction of art is in many cases a blood sport. For me great art contains a element of magic and I had rather soak in the magic than try to prove that that, say, Vermeer used the camera obscura as an aid to his painting. Caillebotte did incorporated elements from classical art, Japanese art, and the Impressionists, but so what? If Vermeer did use a camera obscura he still had to paint the picture.

The real underpinning of all of Caillebotte's works seem to rely on the new art of photography and his training as a naval engineer; he paints pictures like he builds sailboats.  The important point being: his art conveys to us some delightful magic. Below are two selected paintings from his final years and one painting from a earlier period.

By the Sea, 1888-1894 Oil on canvas Private collection
	Laundry Drying, 1892 Oil on canvas, 106 x 151 cm Wallraf-Richartz-Museum

Even though this painting was completed in the 1880s I must include it on this final page. I dare anybody to find a better painting of fruit. Here Caillebotte used an unusual vantage point and composition. This view of fruit  on a market stand creates a distinctive pattern of repeated forms and colors, and the brushstrokes bring out the succulence of the fruit.

Fruit Displayed on a Stand, 1881-1882, Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Notes: 1. Art restoration on his Paris Street; Rainy Day shows a different coloring:  Here

           2. New York Times review of a Caillebotte show in Brooklyn  

           3. Time Line of Caillebotte's Life.

End