Feature Image: Gustave Caillebotte, The Bezique Game (Partie de bésigue), 1880, private collection. The Seventh Impressionist Exhibition-1882.
Impressionism (1860s–1880s).
Born in Paris, this movement broke academic rules by prioritizing an artist’s personal perception over realistic detail.
- Core Focus: Fleeting light, shifting color, and modern urban life capturing immediate, subjective impressions.
- Technique: Rapid, broken brushwork.
- Key Figures: Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Édouard Manet, Alfred Sisley, Gustave Caillebotte.
“King of the Skies!”: Eugène Boudin, Monet’s Mentor, and the Origins of French Impressionism.
FEATURE image: Eugène Boudin, The Beach at Villerville, 1864, Oil on canvas, 18 × 30 1/16 in. (45.7 × 76.4 cm), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Eugène Boudin was far more than a painter of Normandy beaches. He was a pioneering observer of light, atmosphere, sky, and modern life whose artistic innovations helped lay…
The “Tricky Business” of the Caillebotte Bequest: His Last Gift to France Put the Impressionists on Museum Walls.
FEATURE image: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Swing, 1876, oil on canvas, 36 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. CAILLEBOTTE BEQUEST: L’Estaque, c. 1878/9, oil on canvas, 23 1/4 x 28 3/4 inches, Paul Cézanne. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Gustave Caillebotte’s final legacy was his determination to preserve Impressionism through a landmark bequest that forced the…
The Impressionists at War, 1877-1882: Degas, Caillebotte, and the Struggle for the Movement’s Future Through the Fourth to Seventh Impressionist Exhibitions.
FEATURE image: P.A.-Renoir, A Luncheon at Bougival, 1881, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. The Seventh Impressionist Exhibition – 1882. The story of Gustave Caillebotte’s The Bezique Game is really the story of the Impressionist movement’s internal struggle for survival between 1877 and 1882. After the triumphant Third Impressionist Exhibition of 1877, factional disputes, especially Edgar Degas’s…
The Architect of Impressionist Success: Gustave Caillebotte and the 2nd and 3rd Exhibitions of 1876 and 1877.
FEATURE image: Gustave Caillebotte, Paris street; a rainy day (Rue de Paris, Temps de pluie), 1877, The Art Institute of Chicago. Caillebotte submitted his painting to the Third Impressionist Art Exhibition held in Paris in 1877. Gustave Caillebotte was not merely an important Impressionist painter but a crucial organizer, strategist, and financial supporter whose participation…
