Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

Gustave Caillebotte was more than a painter: he collected and researched postage stamps; designed and built yachts and partook in the sport; 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. Structured in four digestible sections that explore the activities of collecting, philately, and sailing, as well as Caillebotte's relationship with literary Naturalism and the writing of 卌ile Zola.

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 never felt 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-based parameters in order to bridge the chasm of his social alienation. 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.