Gustave Caillebotte — New Exhibition Coming to Brooklyn Museum

Probably Caillebotte is better known for his painting “Paris Street, Rainy Day” now in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. This March the first major exhibition of the French Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) will be presented in New York in more than thirty years at the Brooklyn Museum March 27 through July 5, 2009. Interestingly, it was also the Brooklyn Museum in 1977 to open the venue for the landmark exhibition that introduced the artist to the American public. 

From the Brooklyn Museum Press: 

Gustave Caillebotte: Impressionist Paintings from Paris to the Sea presents the artist’s well-known Parisian cityscapes alongside his painted scenes of outdoor life on the coast of Normandy and in the rural villages of Yerres and Petit Gennevilliers, where he and his family maintained estates.

Born into a family of wealth and privilege, Caillebotte was trained as a lawyer and engineer. Following his military service during the Franco-Prussian War, he studied painting at the studio of the academic artist Léon Bonnat. Despite this traditional artistic training, Caillebotte embraced more innovative idioms and exhibited alongside the Impressionists at their groundbreaking exhibitions of the 1870s and 1880s. A key member of the Impressionist circle, he was also a patron of the arts and supported his colleagues and friends financially and collected an impressive body of works by such artists as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, and Camille Pissarro.