Gustave Caillebotte was born in 1848 to Martial and Caleste Caillebotte in a popular part of Paris. He grew up in comfort and moved to a luxurious home in the upper-class part of Paris when he was 18 (Varnedoe, 1). His father was in the textile business and was quite successful thanks to the increased spending of Louis Napoleon on the army. He provided the French army with bedding (Varnedoe, 1). This is how the Caillebottes accumulated their wealth. Gustave and his two other siblings inherited the fortune from their father when he died.
Caillebotte used this fortune to enable himself to paint and to help out his fellow artists in the Impressionist group. ). Caillebotte’s wealth may have caused his relationship with the other impressionist to become unequal as Varnedoe explains in Gustave Caillebotte: a Retrospective Exhibition: “In any event, Caillebotte’s role within the Impressionist group was more than that of a simple fellow participant, and it was his financial support, rather than his critical success, which was most crucial to his colleagues” (Varnedoe, 35). This financial aid that Caillebotte contributed to the group changed people’s conception of him. His status within the Impressionist group was never solidified and the true reason for his membership was questionable. Garb writes in his essay “Masculinity, Muscularity, and Modernity” about Cailliebotte “as a naturalist artist who was also an extremely rich man and generous patron it was never clear under what terms his fellow Impressionists accepted him into the group, as a painter of quality and distinction and an equal, or as a rich benefactor whom they could not afford to offend. He was, therefore, part of and yet apart from a number of different worlds” (Garb, 185). This isolation and separation from the impressionist group is conveyed in Caillebotte’s perissoire paintings.
Caillebotte eventually married in 1892, after he had stopped painting for the most part and moved out to Petit- Gennevillers with his new wife. He died prematurely of heart problems in 1894 (Varnedoe, 12). He left, in his will, his collection of Impressionist artwork to the state of France.
Self-Portrait. Musee d’Orsay. Paris, France. 1892.