Human Flower Project

Saturday, August 19, 2006

Caillebotte’s Last Stand

Gustave Caillebotte, born August 19, 1848, spent his final hours gardening at Petit Gennevilliers.

Le parc de la propriété Caillebotte à Yerres

Gustave Caillebotte, 1875

A late-bloomer among the French Impressionist painters, Gustave Caillebotte was born on this day 1848. Caillebotte befriended Degas, Pissarro, Renoir and Monet, and, being a man of means with the sun in generous Leo, subsidized their early exhibitions, bought their canvasses when nobody else would, and paid the rent on Monet’s studio.

Since Caillebotte didn’t need to sell his own paintings to survive, his works trickled slowly into gallery and museum circulation, where artistic reputations are made. It took art historians 100 years to see beyond his importance as a supporter and collector and look seriously at what he produced. His story is, in fact, quite a blot on the arbiters of culture.

Massif de chrysanthèmes, jardin du Petit-Gennevilliers

Gustave Caillebotte, 1893

Private collection

Image: Humanities Web

Caillebotte wished to donate his fine Impressionist collection to France but stipulated that the works had to be prominently displayed, at the Luxembourg Palace or the Louvre. French officials declined.

“In February 1896, they finally negotiated terms with Renoir, who was the will’s executor, under which they took thirty-eight of the paintings to the Luxembourg. The remaining twenty-nine paintings (one was taken by Renoir in payment for his services as executor) were offered to the French government twice more, in 1904 and 1908, and were both times refused. When the government finally attempted to claim them in 1928, the bequest was repudiated by the widow of Caillebotte’s son. Most of the remaining works were purchased by Albert C. Barnes, and are now held by the Barnes Foundation of Philadelphia.”

What does all this have to do with flowers? Though his friends Monet and Renoir may be better known for flower paintings, Caillebotte turned to this subject with intensity in his later years. In 1881 he bought an estate along the Seine outside Paris at Petit Gennevilliers. Seven years later, he moved there and took up gardening and orchid breeding with gusto. Only an avid gardener would have been privy to this tangle of chrysanthemums, painted in 1893. Caillebotte died the following February while working in his garden. He was 45.