Gustave Caillebotte valuation
Painted Paris's new boulevards, its rowers and floor scrapers, and paid for the Impressionists he exhibited with.
Gustave Caillebotte was born in Paris in 1848 into a wealthy family, took a law degree in 1868 and served in the Franco-Prussian War before studying with the academic painter Léon Bonnat.
What a work by Gustave Caillebotte is worth
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Bio
Gustave Caillebotte was born in Paris in 1848 into a wealthy family, took a law degree in 1868 and served in the Franco-Prussian War before studying with the academic painter Léon Bonnat. His inheritance after his father's death in 1874 let him paint without needing to sell and support his friends: he bought their pictures, paid rents, and helped organise and fund the Impressionist exhibitions, in which he showed from 1876. His own paintings are more realist than most of the group's, sharply drawn scenes of Haussmann's Paris, The Floor Scrapers, Paris Street; Rainy Day and The Europe Bridge, with views from balconies, boating on the Yerres and the Seine, and still lifes. He moved to Petit-Gennevilliers on the Seine, where he built boats and gardened, and died there in 1894, aged forty-five.
Caillebotte did not need to sell, and much of his work stayed with his family until the 1950s, so many paintings have a clear provenance back to his heirs. His bequest of his friends' paintings to the French state became the core of the national Impressionist collection, now at the Musée d'Orsay. Marie Berhaut's catalogue raisonné is the reference.
Paris Street, the bequest and Boating Party
Paris Street; Rainy Day of 1877 was acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1964, and the first full international retrospective came only in 1994, a century after his death.
In 2022 France acquired his Boating Party as a national treasure and sent it on tour, and an exhibition of his paintings travelled from the Musée d'Orsay to the Getty and Chicago in 2024 and 2025.
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