Samuel Raybone

Gustave Caillebotte was more than a painter: he collected postage stamps, designed and raced yachts, cultivated rare orchids, collected Impressionist masterpieces, and organised Impressionist exhibitions. Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter presents the first comprehensive account of Caillebotte's passions and achievements, and reveals for the first time their profound impact upon his art.Where previous studies have examined Caillebotte’s interest in working men, this book develops earlier approaches by excavating Caillebotte’s work on in its own terms, to understand what it meant to him. Caillebotte was born to an haute bourgeois milieu in which he was never entirely comfortable and so he refused the life of idle luxury that his inherited wealth afforded him. Instead, he actively sought out opportunities to work hard, and laboriously studied others hard at work. Working at a moment in which definitions of work and class were being reshaped to suit the needs of a new and fragile Republic, Caillebotte profited from their malleability to fabricate a new sense of self and make his own place in the world. Understanding Gustave Caillebotte as a worker, collector, and painter sheds new light on this idiosyncratic and innovative Impressionist.The Caillebotte that emerges is thus more nuanced, complex, and fascinating than previous scholarship has suggested, offering readers a new reading of the artist's labor, art, and material practice in its broadest sense. As a result, the book stands as an important contribution to 19th-century art history, impressionist studies, and French social history.

Gustave Caillebotte was more than a painter: he collected and researched postage stamps; designed and built yachts; administered and participated in the sport of yachting; collected paintings; cultivated and collected rare orchids; designed and tended his gardens; and engaged in local politics. Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter presents the first comprehensive account of Caillebotte’s manifold activities. It presents a completely new critical interpretation of Caillebotte’s broad career that highlights the singular salience of ‘work’, and which intersects histories and theories of visual culture, ideology, and psychoanalysis. Where the recent art historical ‘rediscovery’ of Caillebotte offers multiple narratives of his identification with working men, this book goes beyond them towards excavating what his work was in its own terms. Born to an haut bourgeois milieu in which he was never completely comfortable and assailed by traumatic familial bereavements, Caillebotte adopted and adapted the ideologically normative category of work for his own purposes, deconstructing its ostensibly class-determinate parameters in order to bridge the chasm of his social alienation.