n the 1870s, an emperor and a baron undertook the remaking of Paris: Napoleon III and Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann's urban renewal project converted clusters of medieval warrens into the Paris we know today, with its grand boulevards and rows of handsome buildings. Impressionist painters showed that new Paris on their canvases — but one of them had a very different perspective.
Gustave Caillebotte's best-known work, Paris Street: Rainy Day (above), painted in 1877, shows a vast cobblestone street, stretching out in front of looming, wedge-shaped buildings. The street is dotted with dark umbrellas that shelter top-hatted men, and women in long skirts — all looking vague and a little disoriented. That was a major subject of Caillebotte's: What the modernization of Paris was doing to its people.
"They seem to be quite alone," says Nicolas Sainte Fare Garnot, curator of the Jacquemart-Andre Museum. "Every person is lost in a very wide world."
The Jacquemart-Andre Museum, which is featuring an exhibition of Caillebotte's work, is located on Boulevard Haussmann — a broad and busy thoroughfare where, in the 1870s, wealthy Parisians built their mansions. (The museum was once the home of banker Edouard Andre and his wife, Nelie Jacquemart.) Caillebotte lived just down the street, and painted what was happening to Paris when Baron Haussmann was remaking it.
In Caillebotte's paintings, men leaning on new bridges seem engulfed by steel girders. Others stand on balconies, looking down at the Boulevard Haussmann — above, yet somehow dwarfed by, the street.
"Modern life doesn't create close relations between human beings," Garnot says. "You are [in] complete loneliness in these new buildings, new avenues, new boulevards. There's something quite sad about that."
Caillebotte's contemporaries — Renoir, Monet, Sisley, Pissaro — also put this "modern" Paris in their paintings. But theirs is a Paris peopled by happy dancers, or sociable boaters, or busy shoppers, or flag-waving parade marchers.
"They just wanted to show pleasant persons or fun activities," Garnot says, "not the kind of loneliness that you find [in Caillebotte.]"
It's Caillebotte's perspectives — his wide-angled, panoramic views — that shade the paintings with sadness. The zooming angles and thrusting spaces are daring, compelling, dramatic and totally original.
Not himself an Impressionist, Caillebotte loved what those painters and others were doing. He befriended them — Manet, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissaro and Cezanne — at local cafes. Garnot says Manet had the habit of receiving friends at the Cafe Guerbois. Caillebotte decided to do the same thing — hosting the artists once a week.
Caillebotte didn't just wine and dine his artist friends — he loaned them money (in fact, he paid the rent on Monet's studio for a while.) And most importantly, he bought their paintings for top dollar. Caillebotte was very wealthy; his father had made a fortune supplying Napoleon's army with uniforms, bedding and other materials. Gustave inherited that fortune at age 26.
