Gustave Caillebotte:
–Robert Louis Stevenson, 1871
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Consider The Pont de l’Europe (1876). There are no dancing daubs here, no luscious brush strokes. Everything is tight, controlled, exact. Caillebotte’s tunneling perspective, drawn in all likelihood from a photograph, sucks your eye forward along the monumental ironwork of the bridge, and just at the vanishing point is the head of the gentleman striding swiftly out of the picture. This gives you an uncanny sense of actually being on the sidewalk at that instant, and, city dog that you are, you instinctively take a reading of all the different vectors in play: the gentleman bounding straight for you, the mincing woman he’s just passed, the dog trotting at your feet, the worker gazing into the railyard, and the old man shuffling along several paces ahead.
On the new boulevards of Paris different classes came together for the first time, creating a field for the play of a new social type: the roving observer, the seeker of impressions, the man who is in the crowd but not of it. He was called a flaneur, or stroller, but let’s forget the perfumy French word; our own Henry James, who was doing a prodigious amount of strolling himself back then, had the same thing in mind with his “restless analyst,” and that describes the top-hatted figure in The Pont de l’Europe exactly. Caillebotte catches him in the middle of his work. Having just overtaken the woman and inhaling, perhaps, a good dose of her patchouli (Sagraves reminds us that the virtue of a woman walking alone, especially in the vicinity of the Saint-Lazare train station, was open to serious doubt), he now points his head, indeed he twists his entire body toward the man leaning against the rail. If you wonder about the difference between a restless analyst and a mere idler, compare the intensity of the beam he directs at the worker, who gazes absently into the abyss of capitalism, with the vapidity of the look the woman is giving him. And since the gentleman is the moving intelligence of this painting it’s no surprise that Caillebotte has made him a self-portrait. The curators have placed a large photograph of the artist nearby that shows him, although older by 15 years, with the same hat, the same coat, and the same cock of the head. Even the dog in the painting looks like he might be related to the original.
In the 1880s Caillebotte began to spend more time in the suburbs, eventually settling there and even getting himself elected to the local town council. He gave up his city themes entirely, and the landscapes he painted during this period are probably the low point in the show. His execution has all the looseness of impressionism with none of its vivacity; the result evokes nothing so much as jigsaw puzzles. Here, indeed, is boredom. The curators struggle gamely with this material, trying to rescue one such canvas, Laundry Drying (1892), with the thought that it was intended as “a major statement on modern life.”
