Caillebotte at the Brooklyn Museum

The first painting by Gustave Caillebotte that I fell in love with was a still life of a fruitseller’s stand that I saw at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. It gave me the impression that he was an artist devoted to intense tropical colors (not at all true, as I found out later).

Next was the painting shown here, La Place de l’Europe, Temps de Pluie. When I sat in on a course by T.J. Clark on art and social change, he used a slide of this painting to show the long airy vistas of the new Paris created by Baron Haussmann, who drove broad avenues through what was a labyrinth of narrow streets (at least in part to make it more difficult for rebels to blockade their neighborhoods). Then I was fortunate enough to see Caillebotte’s painting The Floor Scrapers in the Musee d’Orsay in Paris.

According to the Brooklyn Museum, there has not been a major exhibition of Caillebotte in New York for thirty years, so I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss this one. Unfortunately, I was a little disappointed. None of my three favorites were on display—though there was an alternate version of The Floor Scrapers that was among the best works there.

I did learn what I didn’t know before, that Caillebotte was an avid yachtsman, and I enjoyed seeing the polished wooden models he made for yachts that he planned to build and sail. Each one was a half-hull, about three feet long, and the curves of the hulls and keels were like the contours of powerful sharks.