Gustave Caillebotte

Gustave Caillebotte was born in Paris on 19 August 1848 into wealth that freed him to paint and to support others. He joined the Impressionists as member and patron both, though his own work leaned toward a cleaner realism than theirs. He took early interest in photography, and that eye shows: his best-known canvas, Paris Street; Rainy Day, plays like a staged scene, all geometry and wet cobblestones. When he died on 21 February 1894, he left his collection of Impressionist paintings to the French Republic - a bequest that sparked controversy but became the core of the national collection. The Art Institute of Chicago bought Paris Street in 1964; real attention came in the 1970s. He waited a century for an international retrospective, which arrived in 1994. In 2022 France used its national treasure process to keep Boating Party - noted for its close, vertiginous angle on the water - in the country, then sent it and a survey of his work on tour as a kind of delayed coronation.