Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter 9781501339943, 9781501339974, 9781501339967

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part 1
Chapter 1: Work
Chapter 2: Collecting
Part 2
Chapter 3: Philately and Photography
Chapter 4: Philatelic Impressionism
Part 3
Chapter 5: Classed Corporeality and Naturalist Signification
Chapter 6: Between Caillebotte and Zola
Part 4
Chapter 7: Working as Caillebotte in Petit Gennevilliers
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

ii 

Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter Samuel Raybone

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2020 Copyright © Samuel Raybone, 2020 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Regatta at Argenteuil, 1893 (oil on canvas), Caillebotte, Gustave (1848-94) / Private Collection / Bridgeman Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3994-3 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3996-7 eBook: 978-1-5013-3995-0 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.



For Helena

vi 

Contents List of illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction

viii x 1

Part 1 1 Work 2 Collecting

15 38

Part 2 3 4

Philately and photography Philatelic impressionism

61 78

Part 3 5 6

Classed corporeality and naturalist signification Between Caillebotte and Zola

105 120

Part 4 7

Working as Caillebotte in Petit Gennevilliers

147

Conclusion

165

Notes Bibliography Index

169 216 237

Illustrations Colour plates 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 

Gustave Caillebotte, Les raboteurs de parquet, 1875. 102 × 145 cm, oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, RF 2718. Gustave Caillebotte, Rue de Paris; temps de pluie, 1877. 212 × 276 cm, oil on canvas. The Art Institute, Chicago, 1964.336. Gustave Caillebotte, Régates à Argenteuil, 1893, oil on canvas. Private Collection. Tapling Collection, France Sheet 8. Stamp album sheet. British Library, Philatelic Collections. Gustave Caillebotte, Portrait de l’artiste, c. 1892. 40.5 × 32.5 cm, oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, RF 1971 14. Gustave Caillebotte, La Partie de bésigue, c. 1881. 121 × 161 cm, oil on canvas. Louvre Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi. Gustave Caillebotte, Nu au divan, c. 1880. 129.5 × 195.6 cm, oil on canvas. Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 67.67. Gustave Caillebotte, Les Jardiniers, 1877. 90 × 117 cm, oil on canvas. Private Collection, France.

Figures 0.1 0.2 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5

Gustave Caillebotte, Jeune homme au piano, 1876 Gustave Caillebotte, Madame Boissière tricotant, 1877 Gustave Caillebotte, Autoportrait au chevalet, 1879–80 Gustave Caillebotte, Autoportrait, 1888–9 Gustave Caillebotte, Portrait de Madame Martial Caillebotte, 1877 Gustave Caillebotte, Intérieur, femme lisant, 1880 Gustave Caillebotte, Marine, régates à Villers, c. 1880 Gustave Caillebotte, Périssoires sur l’Yerres, 1878 Gustave Caillebotte, Canotiers ramant sur l’Yerres, 1877 Gustave Caillebotte, Autoportrait à la barre, c. 1893 Gustave Caillebotte, Le Déjeuner, 1876 Tapling Collection, France Sheet 36 50 centimes et 2/10 en sus, Timbre de dimension, Revenue Stamp, 1872 Gustave Caillebotte, Portrait de jeune femme (Madame Hagen), 1877 Gustave Caillebotte, Portrait de Jean Daurelle, 1887

8 9 16 20 22 22 32 34 35 35 39 40 42 52 56

 Illustrations ix Gustave Caillebotte, Le Pont de L’Europe, 1876 Gustave Caillebotte, Les Peintres en bâtiment, 1877 Jean Béraud, Le dimanche, près de Saint-Philippe-du-Roule, 1877 Jean Béraud, Sur le bouvleard, c. mid 1880s Tapling Collection, France Sheet 32 M. de Crauzat, Visite de la Mission chinoise à l’Hôtel des Postes (Le Monde Illustré, 26 May 1866), 1866 4.2 Gustave Caillebotte, Study for Rue de Paris; temps de pluie, 1877 4.3 Gustave Caillebotte, Homme sous un parapluie, de face, avec études de mains, 1877 4.4 Gustave Caillebotte, Esquisse for Les Peintres en bâtiment, 1877 4.5 Jules-Auguste Sage, 15 centime, Type II, ‘Type Sage’ or ‘Peace and Commerce’ series, blue, 1877–8 5.1 Jules Bastien-Lepage, Les foins, 1877 5.2 Claude Monet, Les déchargeurs de charbon, c. 1875 5.3 Jean-François Raffaëlli, Les buveurs d’absinthe, 1881 6.1 Unknown, [Caricature of Les raboteurs de parquet], c. 1875 6.2 Gustave Caillebotte, Jeune homme à sa fenêtre, 1875 6.3 Gustave Caillebotte, Portrait de Monsieur R., 1877 6.4 Gustave Caillebotte, Portrait de Georges Roman, 1879 6.5 Gustave Caillebotte, Henri Cordier, 1883 6.6 Gustave Caillebotte, Study for Nu au divan, 1882 6.7 Gustave Caillebotte, Homme au bain, 1884 7.1 Gustave Caillebotte, Parterre de marguerites, c. 1892–3 7.2 Gustave Caillebotte, Capucines, 1892 7.3 Gustave Caillebotte, Orchidées (cattleya et anturium), 1893 7.4 Gustave Caillebotte, Portraits à la campagne, 1876 7.5 Martial Caillebotte, The House, Studio, Garden, and Greenhouse of Gustave Caillebotte at Petit Gennevilliers, c. 1891–2 7.6 Gustave Caillebotte, Le Jardin potager, Petit Gennevilliers, c. 1881–2 7.7 Gustave Caillebotte, Tournesols au bord de la Seine, c. 1885–6 7.8 Gustave Caillebotte, Linge séchant au bord de la Seine, Petit Gennevilliers, 1892 7.9 Martial Caillebotte, Gustave à sa table à dessin, c. 1891 7.10 Martial Caillebotte, Gustave Caillebotte gardening at Petit Gennevilliers, February 1892 7.11 Gustave Caillebotte, Dahlias cactus rouges, 1892 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 4.1

63 65 68 70 73 82 91 92 94 97 110 114 116 132 134 135 136 137 141 142 148 148 149 153 155 156 157 158 160 162 162

Acknowledgements In One Way Street, Walter Benjamin describes the production of good prose as requiring three steps: a musical one, in which it is composed; an architectonic one, in which it is built; and, finally, a textile stage, when it is woven together. At every stage – while composing, building and weaving this book – I have benefited from the suggestions, questions and advice of others. I first encountered the paintings of Gustave Caillebotte during my undergraduate studies at Durham University, where I became deeply fascinated by his stubborn refusal to play nice with any of the categories, styles and narratives that structured my nascent knowledge of art’s histories. My undergraduate dissertation on Caillebotte’s 1882 Nu au divan, shaped and supported by Anthony Parton, became the overture to my curiosity. The foundations of this book were laid during my doctoral research at The Courtauld Institute of Art, under the supervision of Satish Padiyar. His penetrating insight and sensitive, nuanced scholarship indelibly marked my thinking on Caillebotte. Countless people helped me amass my building materials. M. Gilles Baumont, Assistant du Patrimoine at the Yerres Archives and fellow Caillebotte sympathiser, shared invaluable documentation; discussing Caillebotte’s Yerres paintings in situ with him was an especially rewarding experience. The philatelic staff of the British Library helped me navigate the Tapling Collection and the wider world of postage stamps. The librarians and archival staff at the Musée d’Orsay, Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Archives Nationales each offered vital assistance during my hunt for documents, and Marc-Georges Nowicki sharpened by French so I could read them. I am deeply appreciative to the anonymous reviewers whose comments and feedback on the various guises of this book, its parts and its offshoots have helped me work and rework it, as well as Stephen Bann, Anthea Callen, Marnin Young, Bridget Alsdorf, Claire White, Tamar Garb, Michael Marrinan and William Atkin. I have benefited from opportunities to present and discuss my research at both formative and more developed stages. I thank the conveners, speakers and attendees of the conferences staged by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, Université de Rouen and the ‘labex’ Les Passés dans le Présent de l’Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense (twice); Ghent University and the European Society for Nineteenth-Century Art; the Society for French Studies; the Henry Moore Institute; and the Courtauld Institute of Art, at which I have spoken. Cyril Jousseaume kindly shared with me his video reconstruction of Caillebotte’s house and garden in Petit Gennevilliers, and, setting an example that others would do well to follow if art historical knowledge can continue to be widely shared, some museums and galleries kindly allowed me to reproduce their images at

 Acknowledgements xi no cost: the Musée de la Poste, Paris; the Musée des impressionnismes, Giverny; the Musée Baron Gérard, Bayeux; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. At Bloomsbury, Margaret Michniewicz commissioned the project, before handing over to James Thompson, and Alex Highfield helped source many of the image permissions. I would like to thank the School of Art, Aberystwyth University for generously funding the book’s index. During the long evenings spent weaving these many threads together into something resembling a book, it was only the love and patience of my wife, Helena, that kept the loom moving.

xii

Introduction ‘Caillebotte truly had conviction in him, and what he leaves surpasses the occupation of the amateur. He could have taken painting just as an excuse for the interludes of his life, and given himself the easy luxury and uselessness of a superficial painter. He was master of his time, sure of tomorrow, and he had a passion for gardening and boats. All the same he tied himself down to the labour of painting.’1 Gustave Geffroy, 1894 In 1890, the British press praised effusively Gustave Caillebotte’s (1848–94) collection as ‘magnificent’ and ‘an unparalleled achievement’, lauding its creator as a man of fraternal generosity and scholarly precision, possessed of a discerning eye, and (implicitly) deep pockets.2 Obituaries published following Caillebotte’s death in 1894 further acclaimed his collection for its ‘wealth of specimens and completeness’, taking solace in the patrimonial value it held for all those who shared his passion.3 In France too, the Caillebotte collection was written about as ‘a veritable monument’ which attested to ‘the refined taste and love for work’ of its creator.4 Collector and collection, each as praiseworthy and valuable as the other; that Caillebotte himself painted was, for these writers, largely an afterthought. It was, however, towards Caillebotte’s collection of postage stamps (amassed in conjunction with his brother Martial), and not to his collection of paintings, that the above-quoted publications – The Philatelic Record, The London Philatelist and Le Collectionneur de timbres-poste – directed their admiration. Pursued concurrently with the years of his greatest painterly activity (in terms of works exhibited), Caillebotte’s philatelic practice and stamp collection have been all but erased from the current art historical discourse about a painter only recently receiving the critical attention his work merits.5 Whereas recent exhibitions – in Giverny in 2016, the Propriété Caillebotte in Yerres in 2014, and the Bremen Kuntshalle in 2008 – have started the much-needed process of reassessing the connections that existed between Caillebotte’s various pursuits (which, in addition to painting, included collecting Impressionist paintings; collecting and researching postage stamps; cultivating and collecting rare orchids; garden design and floriculture; designing, racing and collecting racing yachts; administering the sport of yacht racing; and local political administration) and his painting, Caillebotte’s philately has so far been largely neglected.6 That Caillebotte’s collecting activities almost completely overshadowed his painting during the later years of his life and for a period after his death will be familiar to any reader acquainted with Caillebotte’s posthumous reputation as a bourgeois dilettante who ‘also painted in his spare time’.7 What might be less familiar to such a reader is this

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Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

rosy picture of universal press acclaim. Indeed, the mooted donation of Caillebotte’s collection of Impressionist paintings to the French State was met with such hostility and prevarication, only eventually accepted ‘with the greatest embarrassment’ – in the infamous and caustic opinion of Jean-Léon Gérôme: ‘For the state to accept such filth would be a blot on morality’ – as to have attracted the moniker l’Affaire Caillebotte.8 One of the central concerns of this book is to take Caillebotte’s broad creative project as seriously as he himself did, resisting the inherent disciplinary pressure exerted by art history to constitute the object of its investigation as a painter first and foremost, as if to justify and legitimize the knowledge it produces about them. Art historical narratives of Caillebotte have produced him as being, above all, a painter in relation to other painters, situating his work uncomfortably between the genre-tags of Impressionism and Realism. Everything he did that was not painting has, until relatively recently, been largely elided. Yet, to ignore or downplay such important areas of Caillebotte’s life work is not only to do a disservice to his extraordinary accomplishments in each field but also to forego the profound hermeneutic value offered by re-situating Caillebotte’s paintings in the creative matrix within which Caillebotte himself produced and experienced them. In my efforts to offer readings of Caillebotte’s paintings which locate them within the ideological coordinates of the historical moment in which they were produced and first understood, Caillebotte’s broad and multifaceted lifelong fascination with work, of which collecting and painting were facets, offers a vital mechanism for thinking about how Caillebotte himself understood and experienced his ideology. That is, I suggest that we must follow and go beyond the tantalizingly posed, but insufficiently developed, hypothetical of Sophie Pietri that ‘[the] portrait of Caillebotte the amateur perhaps gives us a key to understanding his painting’.9 Scholars including Albert Boime and Julia Sagraves have argued that Caillebotte’s painterly vision reveals his ‘thorough assimilation of the rhetoric of the fledgling Third Republic trying to define itself ’ through the erasure of Communard class conflict.10 These readings of Caillebotte’s accordance with Republican ideology draw from the revisionist art history whose proponents, notably T. J. Clark and Robert. L. Herbert, have articulated Impressionism’s fundamental complicity with Haussmannization and with the bourgeois dominated state it symbolized.11 Boime and Sagraves convey the importance for historically sensitive readings of Caillebotte’s paintings to excavate their intimate connections with the Republic that was constituting itself anew following the historical trauma of 1870–1. However, although they indeed situate Caillebotte’s images of work within historical and statist discourses on work and class, such perspectives have typically failed to examine critically or elucidate Caillebotte’s attitudes towards his own work, broadly or holistically. As Mary Morton and George T. M. Shackelford have recently noted, the elements that distinguish Caillebotte’s paintings from those of his fellow Impressionists and Naturalists are the marks of the ‘laboured, built up, and self-conscious’ painterly process that Caillebotte legibly encoded; where Morton and Shackelford identify this as evidence for a failing of the artist’s skill or technique, as the conspicuous absence of a ‘mastery of painting’, I intend to demonstrate that Caillebotte’s painterly representations of work, when contextualized within the parameters of his own creative project, the central motor of which was the desire or

 Introduction 3 compulsion to collect (stamps, orchids, paintings, yachts), emerge themselves as the self-conscious and ambitiously reflexive products of multiple forms of work.12 Offering multiple spheres in which Caillebotte could fashion his activity as work, and himself as a worker, his collecting, gardening, yachting and painting practices – the spaces, objects, activities, and sociabilities they all implied – can be fruitfully read as the hinge that connected Caillebotte to his ideologically constructed social reality, which was itself held together by a certain conception of what it meant to work. The analytical possibilities of this understanding of the profound significance of work for Caillebotte run in both directions, revealing as much about the normative ideological parameters of work in the art, visual culture and ideology of the Third Republic as about Caillebotte’s complex, nuanced, and adaptive re-articulation of them. My understanding of ideology is indebted to the Marxist-Lacanian theory of Slavoj Žižek. Žižek conceptualizes ideology as a set of representations which constitute social subjectivity.13 These representations exist in conjunction with communal rituals, and an unconscious social fantasy which conditions the enjoyment of subjects’ participation in their political community. By regulating the relationship between the visible and the invisible, ideology structures the social reality.14 Ideological fantasy provides the subject’s experience of its reality as a coherent entity untroubled by socio-economic antagonisms and effaces the exclusions and foreclosures inherent in the constitution of any society.15 If we are to think about work as a hinge-concept in Caillebotte’s relationship to himself and his society, Žižek’s articulation of ideology’s multi-layered structure is crucial, in that it offers a way to think about the precise form of the relations between the subjective and the social, between the psychic and the symbolic – that is, conceiving of the full socio-subjective ramifications of the symbolic work of representation. Moreover, in articulating the structural connections between meaning and enjoyment, Žižek’s theory of ideology and method of ideology critique offer a valuable set of conceptual tools for unpicking the totality of Caillebotte’s project in the context of the dominant ideology’s construction and enforcement of its social reality as an organization of the visible.16 To be a citizen of the Third Republic meant being a worker in a society of workers. As Claire White notes, ‘the language of labour politics had been burned onto the social consciousness by the political Revolution of 1789, and it remained critical to those subsequent moments of social upheaval and political rupture that punctuated [… France’s] nineteenth century.’17 The traumatic birth of the Third Republic – rising haphazardly from the ashes of a Second Empire regime fatally caught between, on the one hand, the humiliating penetration of national borders and territorial amputation realized by the external forces of Prussia and, on the other, the internal contagion of open class warfare on the streets of Paris – was, briefly, just one such of these moments. Yet, the revolt of working Paris triggered a decade-long reactionary spasm of Moral Order that decimated organized labour and leftist politics (such as it was) so completely that it recovered its vitality, coherency and militancy only after 1889.18 At the moment of the Republican success over monarchism and Moral Order at the end of the 1870s, the voices of organized labour, syndicalism or socialism were silenced to the extent that almost the entirety of the political spectrum (as it reflected parliamentary

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Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

political power) was internal to the Republican faction, whose primary fault line was between the Radicals and the Opportunists, and which spanned Radicals, the centre-left, Ferry’s Republican Left and Gambetta’s Republican Union.19 Facing little competition or challenge from organized labour, starting in the second half of the 1870s Republicans crafted, and in turn came to depend on, an almost universal worker identity as the ideal basis for a harmonious reconstitution of the social. Consequently, the Republican discourse went largely unchallenged. ‘Almost everybody in France’, remarks Gabriel Weisberg, ‘became a worker: rich, poor, businessmen of both major and minor importance became workers destined to create a type of ideal society which they knew to be beneficial for all’.20 Various scholars, most notably James E. Lehring and Jann Pasler, have characterized the form of Third Republican political culture as a response to the grave need faced by the new state to create both norms and examples of citizenship that would be beneficial to, and demonstrative of, its own political values and ideological goals.21 Under the banner of liberté, égalité, fraternité, the Republic stressed, albeit vaguely: class cohesion, secularism, inclusivity, prosperity, progress, liberty and democracy.22 The kernel of this new conceptualization of Third Republican citizenship was a common attitude to work, what Patricia Tilburg describes as the Republican ‘culture of work’, wherein ‘work would serve as the unifying force behind a dynamic new French society’.23 The performance of hard, manual labour promised both moral vitality and corporeal virility: the hardening of bodies to repel external invasion and the fortifying of the spirit to ward off internal deviance. The value of work was thus precipitated on its acting as a conduit for class cohesion, solidarity and equality.24 Understandings of work in the nineteenth century were coloured by the heritage of the French Revolution, which itself drew on Enlightenment thinking to posit useful labour as an ethical and social duty and as the basis of citizenship (contra the JudeoChristian alignment of work with toil and sin). The less-than-satisfactory outcome of the Revolution, which had, from the perspective of later socialists such as Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, sacrificed its fraternité of honest labourers in favour of liberalbourgeois greed, effected a permanent demystification of the supposed ethical basis of property in useful labour: the resulting antagonism and antipathy that characterized the workers’ movement’s relation to the bourgeoisie and the state for the entirety of the next century reached its zenith with the Commune.25 Precisely because the Opportunist bourgeoisie attempted to suture the social by highlighting the labour they shared with the workers, the disavowal of class difference and conflict became a central component of the political culture of the Third Republic, the very exclusion upon which the universality of its appeal was based. Work and class thus became intertwined in Third Republican ideology; they did not signify straightforward material categories, but rather complex positions in discourse. The labour history of Jacques Rancière offers a powerful conceptual model for examining this important distinction. Rancière’s deconstruction of the writings of a series of French worker-poets and writers from the period around the Revolution of 1830 in La Nuit des prolétaires strove to highlight their constitutive multiplicity and expose their moments of rupture.26 Rancière critiqued Marxist and social history’s

 Introduction 5 fetishization of materiality, arguing instead that class was a category of discourse, forged not by a matrix of economic relations but instead through the difficult entry of workers into discourse. The working class emerges in Rancière’s writing as the product of a series of textual or discursive relations between workers and intellectuals – ‘the working class is a concept that continually takes place in discussions, misunderstandings, and conflicts between workers and intellectuals’ – spawned at moments when workers themselves resisted the categorizing or taxonomizing imperatives of their time to transgress the boundaries that separated those who worked from those who thought.27 Never static, homogeneous or whole, the working class designates a partial and contentious linkage between representation and experience. If the category of the working class is actively produced and reproduced in discourse – Gérard Noiriel articulates a similar idea in his suggestion that the working class is never ‘made’ but constantly in flux – it is thus liable to shift and is exposed to the power-relations and ideological imperatives that operate within the symbolic or discursive field more generally.28 As much as they are revealing of Caillebotte’s personal and subjective investments in identifying with workers, his paintings can be fruitfully read as interventions into the very process by which the working class is itself produced as a category of discourse, the interaction of bourgeois and workers.29 My critical focus is thus on the representational act itself as the crucible of categories of identity, difference and experience. Rather than attempt to produce a coherent historical narrative of the working class of the French Third Republic as the hermeneutic ground for my art historical practice, I instead seek to investigate those specific, polemical and problematical moments of contact between workers and intellectuals where the very language with which it became possible to think of work and class as such was being conceived and challenged. In seeking such moments of categorical reconfiguration, the art of Gustave Caillebotte – an haut bourgeois painter notably uncomfortable with the strictures of his class heritage (as Tamar Garb puts it, ‘Caillebotte lived out an ambivalent and conflictive relation to his own class identity … . He was … part of yet apart from a number of different worlds’) – offers especially fertile ground.30 Caillebotte’s paintings of bourgeois life expose its precarious and fragile artificiality, while his paintings of working men reveal an interest in and identification with the specificities of their craft.31 Caillebotte’s categorical liminality and discomfort (his failure or refusal to perform as expected of a bourgeois man, his desire to escape or transgress class boundaries) afforded him a highly idiosyncratic vantage point on contemporaneous discourses of class; likewise his paintings of work, in approaching their subject with a certain obliqueness, are especially revealing of the ideological parameters of his historical moment. Although my project is not a ‘history from below’ that aims to give voice to the silenced workers as painted by Caillebotte, it nevertheless seeks to account for those processes by which they were variously rendered audible or mute, visible or invisible in symbolic space. Therefore, in my attempt to account for Caillebotte’s images of men at work in the context of his ambivalence towards himself as a (sort of) working man – my project to offer an ideologically critical reading of their functioning in respect to the Third

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Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

Republic’s discourses on work as the foundation of citizenship and structures of class domination – I maintain a focus on those ideological pressure points: moments where the boundaries of normativity seemed precarious or malleable, most closely related to the terms of Caillebotte’s imagined relation to that normativity. Rather than adopting an extrinsic view of ideological normativity, examining from their own perspective how those constitutionally excluded from its remit rearticulated the terms of their oppression, for my purposes it is more revealing to adopt Caillebotte’s more liminal view, looking at boundaries from the vantage point of a subject who perceived himself to exist in an ambiguous relation to them while remaining attentive to how their ostensible breakdown was not necessarily all that destabilizing. Caillebotte’s fascination with work was, primarily, a fascination with male work, with men at work: in seeking model labourers to act as a foil for an introspective examination of his own class-alienated subjectivity, it seems logical that Caillebotte would most strongly seek to identify with individuals with whom he already had a minimum of commonality. Moreover, in making a distinction on the grounds of gender, Caillebotte (instinctively or consciously) was indeed mirroring the sexual division at the heart of the Republican ideology of work in relation to citizenship; in attempting to foster a polity and regulate its relationship with the state, this ideology enforced the sexual division of citizenship as one of labour. It is for this reason that, as we shall see, it is altogether more fruitful to contextualize Caillebotte’s paintings within the contemporaneously dominant Naturalism, within which ideological normative forms of work were visualized, rather than images which, for one reason or another, might superficially appear closer to Caillebotte’s practice, for example Edgar Degas’s washerwomen or Camille Pissarro’s female peasants. Caillebotte’s class-alienated subjectivity has thus been the starting point for my assessment of his painterly practice in relation to the ideological production of understandings of work and class in this period. Given this, it seemed necessary to understand how Caillebotte himself understood this same practice; to go beyond thinking of Caillebotte as a painter identifying with workers towards offering an account of what his work was in its own terms. In pursuit of this, I began to investigate the myriad activities he pursued concurrently with painting – which included gardening, yachting, philately, and local politics – as the immediate sociable, temporal, practical and conceptual context for his painterly practice. Led by this archive, I have come to understand these activities as specific, idiosyncratic, forms of work, each existing in a structurally delimited relation to the others. Painting was not his privileged passion but rather one of a number of activities into which Caillebotte invested equally his time, energy and creativity. Caillebotte’s life of labours exposed and decomposed a number of the binaries and concepts that structured not only Third Republican ideology but also the subsequent historical narrative discourses by which knowledge about it (and its relation to, for example, Impressionist painting) has been produced: work/leisure, worker/bourgeois, those who think/those who work, painting/distractions, work’s determinate relation to class. It was in hybridizing and cross-pollinating his various labours that Caillebotte undertook to bridge that gap signified by the notion of alienation, between ‘Caillebotte’

 Introduction 7 the subject and ‘Caillebotte’ the subjectivity. Caillebotte’s resulting elaboration of what his work was, what it meant to him, I have come to believe, constituted a fundamental re-articulation of the normative terms of Republican ideology. His paintings condense the problematic and polemical representational act, described by Rancière, in which the worker is himself or herself constructed; for Caillebotte, this meant the painter as much as his subject. Gustave Caillebotte, a child of 1848, raised during the Second Empire, was made acutely aware of the ideological importance of work and class for the Third Republic, having experienced first-hand the historical conditions from which it emerged. From within the ranks of the Garde Mobile de la Seine, Caillebotte witnessed the fall of the Second Empire regime to which his family owed their past, present and (it would certainly have been reasonable of them to presume) future material prosperity and social position.32 Profoundly affected, Caillebotte almost immediately abandoned his nascent legal career to become a painter. After travelling to Italy and then studying briefly under Léon Bonnat’s ‘highly orthodox tutelage’, Caillebotte soon fell in with the Impressionists, exhibiting with them five times between 1876 and 1882.33 As Gloria Groom and Kirk Varnedoe (among others) have noted, such an abrupt transition left Caillebotte notably uncomfortable with his liminal position between, on the one hand, the haut bourgeois milieu into which he had been born and, on the other, the ostensibly radical milieu of his Impressionist comrades.34 Caillebotte’s paintings from this period reveal a persistent fascination with the spaces, objects, processes and bodies involved in the performances of labour he saw going on around him.35 His documentary impulse impelled him towards a critical investigation of the dynamics of work and class as they applied in kind to workers and bourgeois, to his subjects as to himself, as a locus of bodily performativity and as the basis for social relations.36 Even his paintings of his bourgeois friends and family, themselves liberated by virtue of their class inheritance from the material need to work, are infected by the pervasive language of labour, featuring them, as Gloria Groom puts it, ‘working at leisure’.37 Caillebotte’s first major painting, Les raboteurs de parquet (Plate 1), was rejected by the Salon jury in 1875. The work depicts (with a perspicacity perhaps too Realist for the Academicians) three, half-naked, floor scrapers hard at work planing the floor of the room that Martial Caillebotte père had earmarked for his son’s studio in the Caillebotte family’s hôtel particulier on the rue de Miromesnil. Consequently, his first public exhibition came at the Second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876.38 Here, he exhibited Les raboteurs de parquet alongside a later variant on the same theme, and other paintings depicting members of his family and staged, like Les raboteurs de parquet, in the family home: Jeune homme au piano (Figure 0.1), Jeune homme à sa fenêtre (Figure 6.2) and Le Déjeuner (Figure 2.1). When viewed together, the hardworking and work-hardened bodies of the raboteurs resonate with (Caillebotte’s brother) Martial’s stiff and upright body as he plays the piano, and (Caillebotte’s other brother) René’s taut vigil as he looks out on Haussmannized Paris through his window. Caillebotte’s painterly focus on the hands of the floor scrapers, as they manipulate their tools, conducting the force of their body down through the floor, is matched

8

Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

Figure 0.1  Gustave Caillebotte, Jeune homme au piano, 1876. 81.3 × 116.8 cm, oil on canvas. Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo. by the attention he gives to the tension with which René manipulates his utensils in Le Déjeuner (Figure 2.1). In these paintings, work and leisure are serious business, requiring the complete attention of mind and body. At the Third Impressionist Exhibition in 1877 Caillebotte debuted three large-scale street paintings: Rue de Paris; temps de pluie (Plate 2), Le Pont de l’Europe (Figure 3.1) and Les Peintres en bâtiment (Figure 3.2). Set in Caillebotte’s native, and fashionably Haussmannized, 8ème arrondissement, these paintings explore the social dynamics of class and the capacity of the built environment to impinge upon them. Characterized by their neutral palettes, plunging perspectives and strongly articulated orthogonal or recessional structures, Caillebotte’s 1877 street scenes visualize a social organism whose various class constituencies share the same space, but nothing more. Whether at the Carrefour de Moscou or on the Pont de l’Europe, besuited bourgeois and besmocked workers are caught in a kind of absorptive closure that precludes sociable or narrative interaction, among themselves or with the viewer. As in 1876, Caillebotte focused on the manual manipulation of an object legibly connotative of specific class positions, in this case paintbrushes and umbrellas, as the locus of the performance of work, and the synecdoche for class identification itself.39 Caillebotte’s contributions to the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition in 1879 revealed his attention to have shifted away from the static class alienation of urban life. Presently, his painterly output was split between scenes detailing, firstly, a more distanced and sanitized view of Paris’s public spaces seen from above (in paintings like La Rue Halévy, vue du sixième étage, 1878 the diminutive scale makes cohere what Caillebotte had

 Introduction 9 pointedly fragmented in 1877; the elevated viewpoint offers a fantasy of specular power and possession) and, secondly, the dynamic bodily activity of rowing (Figure 1.6), swimming (Baigneurs, bords de l’Yerres, 1878) and fishing (Pêche à la ligne, 1878) on the Caillebotte family’s Yerres estate. Nevertheless, Caillebotte continued to probe the potentially stifling and alienated world of bourgeois domesticity, especially, as his portraits of Eugène Daufresne, lisant, 1878 and Madame Boissière tricotant (Figure 0.2) reveal, in relation to strictures of work and leisure: a topic which continued to feature prominently among his output in 1880 (Figure 1.4 and Intérieur, femme à la fenêtre, 1880) and 1882 (Plate 6). Following the marriage of his brother Martial in 1887, with whom he had been cohabiting since the death of their mother in 1878, Caillebotte spent an increasing amount of time in Petit Gennevilliers, where he resided in a property he had co-purchased with Martial in 1881, and to which he would move permanently in 1888. There, he became seriously involved in the sport of competitive yacht racing, as well as horticulture, floriculture and collecting rare orchids. His contemporaneous painting shifted in accordance with the new kinds of work offered by life outside of Paris: increasingly, Caillebotte came to paint the regattas staged in Argenteuil and further afield (Figure 1.5), orchids (Figure 7.3) and gardens that were occupying his mental and physical energy. In these paintings, Caillebotte retained from his exploration of work in Paris the keen, detail-oriented gaze that rendered the performative practices, objects and spaces of work in such sharp focus. It was in the grounds of his Petit Gennevilliers estate that he was to die suddenly, on 21 February 1894.

Figure 0.2  Gustave Caillebotte, Madame Boissière tricotant, 1877. 65.1 × 80 cm, oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas.

10

Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

Part 1 begins by investigating Caillebotte’s self-portraits in order to nuance and complicate the prevailing topos of his alienated or fractured subjectivity. In the first chapter, tracing a genealogy of his self-portraits reveals how legibly encoded signifiers of the work of painting simultaneously functioned to symbolize both his feelings of displacement and their putative resolution. Consequently, Caillebotte became stuck on working at painting. A comparative reading of Autoportrait au chevalet (Figure 1.1) and Régates à Argenteuil (Plate 3) further reveals the crucial role played by Caillebotte’s extra-artistic pursuits – here, collecting, designing, and racing yachts – in his painterly production of a sense of self. Autoportrait au chevalet, a complex painting of Caillebotte painting, fractures Caillebotte’s body into its constituent components, which are subsequently either saturated with meaning or produced as pure absence. In contrast, Régates à Argenteuil, which depicts Caillebotte, accompanied by his sailor Joseph, racing Roastbeef (a yacht of Caillebotte’s design) in a regatta on the Seine, successfully articulates Caillebotte’s satisfied virtuosity. Unlike Autoportrait au chevalet, Régates à Argenteuil, painted fourteen years later and only a year before Caillebotte’s death, I demonstrate, firstly draws its visual and symbolic form from Caillebotte’s wealth of experience with collecting (its will to totality, its processes of serialization and ordering, its strong surface orthogonality) and, secondly, collapses multiple kinds of work (yacht design, racing, collecting, representation, being represented, the work of both Caillebotte and Joseph) together on the surface of the canvas. Chapter 2 builds on this connection and traces the origins of Caillebotte’s life-long fascination with collecting. It draws from a wealth of biographical sources, as well as the critical-theoretical wellsprings of Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, to produce a reading of Caillebotte as compulsively stuck on collecting, which first took the form of collecting postage stamps, as a repetition of infantile and adult traumas in such a way as to comprehend and eventually overcome them. Juliet Mitchell’s psychoanalytical study of Siblings offers me a mechanism for thinking about the sibling relation as a kind of traumatic seriality, wherein the sibling is othered as not-me-but-like-me, and, going beyond Mitchell, self and sibling are ordered into a kind of collection by the Mother.40 As such, processes of sibling seriality are foundational elements in subject formation, and I read collecting as a repetition of the trauma of sibling displacement. The particular historical forms taken by Caillebotte’s need to collect emerged in relation to the trauma of bereavements (Caillebotte lost his father in 1874, brother René in 1876 and mother in 1878) and the related fear of death. The chapter examines the year 1887 as a key transitional moment in Caillebotte’s collecting practice through the lens of the Lacanian ‘acting out’. Caillebotte’s abrupt cessation of stamp collecting is read as a reaction to the loss (to marriage, rather than death) of his brother Martial, and the failure of the stamp collection to screen Caillebotte from loss’s insistent return. Contemporaneous formal shifts in Caillebotte’s paintings of yachting are read in light of this transitional moment in Caillebotte’s working and collecting practices: his move from collecting stamps and paintings to yachts and orchids. Part 2 expands my reading of Régates à Argenteuil as being about the fusion of different kinds of work, an intricate coming together of painting and collecting, by

 Introduction 11 introducing the idea of Caillebotte’s philatelic impressionism. Chapter 3 seeks to nuance the connection that is frequently made between Caillebotte and photography by drawing out the crucial differences between Caillebotte’s idiosyncratic vision and the generalized photographic zeitgeist in the context of which it is routinely understood. The visual and symbolic forms of his paintings of the Haussmannized public spaces of Paris – Rue de Paris; temps de pluie (Plate 2), Le Pont de L’Europe (Figure 3.1) and Les Peintres en bâtiment (Figure 3.2) – closely resemble and may have originated in the stamp album’s ordered orthogonality, serially iterative narrative form, prioritization of conceptual organization principles over naturalistic verism and oscillation between attention to overall effect and microscopic detail. Although no longer in existence per se, the Caillebottes’ philatelic collection is reconstructed through the fundamental influence it had on the surviving Tapling Collection, into which it was amalgamated in 1887. In Chapter 4, Caillebotte’s philatelic impressionism is contextualized within the prevailing ideological coordinates in which stamps, and the postal service from which they emanated and within which they were ordinarily used, were understood and experienced. Postage stamps were elements of a shared, state-sanctioned visual and material culture, acting both as carriers for the official iconography of the state and as object-mediators in the communicative life of citizens. Drawing from written and visual historical sources, I examine the postal service itself as a system for the spectacular and ideological elucidation of the power and efficiency of the state to taxonomize, organize and order its citizens and their lives. In this respect, postage stamps and the postal service were intimately bound up in the very same political and ideological systems and processes through which Haussmannized Paris, Caillebotte’s subject, was itself produced. In the post-Commune moment, when the normative ideological imperative was towards closure and the erasure of (class) difference (a fantasy of social cohesion), the stamp collection (itself the materialization of processes of totalization, organization, and the erasure of difference through iterative serialization) offered Caillebotte the visual and conceptual means by which he could think through the ideological production of public space, the class encounter and his built environment. Part 3 takes Émile Zola’s critique of Caillebotte’s raboteurs de parquet and Jeune homme à sa fenêtre (Plate 1 and Figure 6.2) as ‘neat and glass clear, bourgeois in the force of [their] exactitude …, without original artistic temperament [l’impression originale du peintre]’ as its point of departure in order to examine Caillebotte’s production of working and classed bodies in relation to contemporaneous ideologies of ‘temperament’, ‘classed corporeality’ and the ‘work’ of the artist.41 I argue that, in the context of his conception of the value of his own literary work, what Zola found problematic in Caillebotte’s painting was the absence of ‘the smell of the people’ – a fidelity to the extremes of his subject’s corporeal experience. In Chapter 5, Zola’s implicit evocation of the ideological category of temperament is understood, in the context of Naturalism more broadly, as offering a vector by which cerebral and physical labour could be distinguished and hierarchized. Reading Zola’s L’Assommoir against and alongside Caillebotte’s paintings in Chapter 6 reveals their shared awareness of the power of work to make the body both desirable and disgusting, to break it down

12

Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

into its constituent fragments and to make it congeal as a closed totality, ensconced behind a sanitizing veil of light and ocular signification. In his 1875 works, as Zola perceived, Caillebotte withdrew from the phenomenological, corporeal aspect of hard, physical labour, distancing himself and his viewers from floor scrapers (by virtue of a sheen-like screen of light diffused through a window) and bourgeois (through the opaque but curiously vacant black suit) alike. However, in his late nudes, specifically Homme au bain (Figure 6.7) and Nu au divan (Plate 7), Caillebotte, in moving beyond a representation of work, approaches the grim spectacle of the body’s breakdown. In these paintings, Caillebotte’s intimate and potentially desiring gaze deconstructs the naked bodies he observes into their overvalued constituent fragments. The cessation of work renders, for Caillebotte, corporeal experience sensible, yet disturbingly unfixed. Chapter 7 focuses on Caillebotte’s late flower paintings, often missing in scholarly accounts of the artist which instead choose to focus on his earlier, ‘more ambitious’ years. However, when read in their proper context, the multifarious creative crucible of Petit Gennevilliers, that they in fact represent the continuation and, in many ways, culmination of Caillebotte’s life-long desire to cross-pollinate his passions and in so doing invest in a fantasy of painting’s power to remake his class identity.

Part 1

14 

1

Work

His hat pushed back, hands in pockets, M. Caillebotte came and went giving orders, supervising the hanging of the paintings, and working like a porter, exactly as if he didn’t have an income of one hundred and fifty thousand francs.1 Gaston Vassy, 1882 It might at first seem strange to begin a book about a man as wealthy as Gustave Caillebotte, ostensibly liberated by his inherited fortune from the necessity to labour, with the problematic of work. Yet, Caillebotte was ill-at-ease with the world of idle leisure and easy privilege into which he had been born and socialized. Caillebotte’s selfportraits, portraits of his fellow bourgeois and scenes of their domestic lives register his ‘ambivalent and conflictive relation to his own class identity’ and his ‘sense of isolation and loneliness’.2 Whether they are gathered round the table for lunch (Figure 2.1) or sat reading alongside one another (Figure 1.4), Caillebotte’s elite milieu interact neither with one another nor with the painter who studies them; likewise, central to the charge of Les raboteurs de parquet (Plate 1) is the hermetic sociability of the labourers and Caillebotte’s inability to imagine his own position as anything but extrinsic. As I will show, Caillebotte came to identify in work the means to reconfigure this liminal and troublesome class identity; he undertook to resolve his alienation through hard work in a manner recognized as such by his contemporaries. Caillebotte returned again and again to ‘the fabrication of his own mirror image’ in terms that emphasized precisely the labour of its fabrication.3 Painted between 1879 and 1880, Autoportrait au chevalet (Figure 1.1) directly thematizes the labour of self-imaging. Keeping his gaze fixed directly out of the frame Caillebotte extends a hand to make contact with the surface of a canvas that is turned and hidden from the viewer. In the background, another figure relaxes on a couch, possibly reading a newspaper. This sofa – which features in other domestic interiors including La Partie de bésigue (Plate 6), Nu au divan (Plate 7) and Intérieur, femme lisant (Figure 1.4) – reveals the location of the scene to be inside Caillebotte’s apartment. Caillebotte sits awkwardly on a stool, half-turned to face the viewer, dressed in a loose, black smock that cuts something of a void in the centre of the canvas. Caillebotte has abandoned the precise and polished, quasi-photographic facture that had characterized his most prominent contributions to the 1877 exhibition – Le

16

Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

Figure 1.1  Gustave Caillebotte, Autoportrait au chevalet, 1879–80. 90 × 115 cm, oil on canvas. Private Collection. Pont de l’Europe (Figure 3.1), Rue de Paris; temps de pluie (Plate 2) and Les Peintres en bâtiment (Figure 3.2) – in favour of a looser technique and more textured surface, especially evident in his face. This impastoed thickness impresses upon the viewer the materiality of the painted object (against the voidal black smock, Caillebotte’s colourful palette and bright paintbrushes positively shimmer) and, combined with the obvious iconography of the image, the physical process by which the painting came into being. The awkward pose of the figures, the dearth of social interaction and the inharmonious composition testify to the contrived nature of the scene and genre. The viewer is positioned slightly raised looking down, such that both the top of the room and the bottom of Caillebotte’s legs are cut off. To the left a plant creeps into the frame at a slight diagonal, occupying a nervous liminal existence. To the right of the painting Caillebotte represents in shadow the back of the canvas and the easel that supports it. Although Caillebotte looks out of the canvas to meet the viewer’s gaze, he, like his companion in the background, seems absorbed in a process of visual calculation; we see him, but he does not appear to see us.4 This frustrated matrix of gazes, in combination with his ungainly three-quarter pose and the viewer’s centred vantage point, suggests that Caillebotte is here representing himself painting the very self-portrait in which we witness him painting. The viewer occupies the position of the mirror, which Caillebotte studies carefully as he paints his own image, explaining his absorption and inaccessibility to the viewer and fusing the

 Work 17 surface of the painting with the surface being worked upon in the painting.5 We will see in other paintings, most notably the Régates à Argenteuil (Plate 3), how Caillebotte became fixated on the hand at work, seen as a conduit between the physical and psychical worlds and as a synecdoche for the entire subjective edifice that that very work constructs and supports. Here, as there, the outstretched hand, in symbolizing the skill and work of the artist, produces this identity by physically connecting Caillebotte with the object of his creation and possession. Composition and motif thus unite in calling the viewer’s attention to the painting’s surface as something worked upon by Caillebotte. Given the setting of the painting inside Caillebotte’s well-appointed and desirably located apartment on the boulevard Haussmann; the prominence given to Caillebotte’s possessions within the scene; and the heritage of the genre of the artist’s self-portrait as a device for self-promotion, self-imaging and the demonstration of technical mastery, might it be plausible to read this work as an emphatic statement of wealth and possession (as opposed to a somewhat tentative scene of fabrication)? Recent accounts of Caillebotte’s oeuvre have emphasized the prevalence of just such a (classed) desire for possession, a ‘possessive energy’ that caused him to ‘cycle round the theme of his own property’ and to paint Paris as if it was already his.6 Caillebotte was indeed surrounded by and materially dependent upon his property. As critics including Jules Poignard informed their readers, Caillebotte was a ‘rentier’; he lived off income generated by property, government bonds, stocks and capital inherited (in stages and sometimes indirectly, coming via the deaths of René and his mother) from his father.7 As Michael Marrinan notes, Caillebotte had been primed for the life of a héritier and rentier not merely by means of his prestigious education (at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand), but also by having had a childhood thoroughly steeped in his father’s commercial and real estate ventures: ‘the Caillebotte world of business and family’, Marrinan writes, ‘was small and tightly inter-connected’.8 By these two factors Caillebotte was induced into a highly exclusive and privileged world – less than 2 per cent of boys attended a lycée or college – of which being a rentier was increasingly becoming the symbol: in Paris in 1880 one third of lycée students had a rentier for a parent.9 At the turn of 1841–2, Caillebotte’s father, Martial père, spent 45,000 francs buying into a joint venture founded solely to bid for the newly available concession to service the beds of the July Monarchy’s army. Cambry et Cie, as it became known, was very successful, accruing a net worth of over 10 million francs by 1856, and 20 million francs by the time the business was liquidated in 1865. In his role as inspecteur-généraldirecteur des confections of Cambry et Cie Martial père was responsible for supervising day-to-day operations and was thus required to reside with his family in a house at 160 Faubourg Saint-Denis (later renumbered to 152), owned by the firm and adjacent to its workshops. It was in this company house, next door to the company workshop, that Caillebotte spent the first twenty years of his life. With the proceeds generated by his participation in Cambry et Cie, in January 1866 Martial père purchased a plot of land on the corners of the rue de Miromesnil, the rue de Lisbonne and the rue de Corvetto, upon which he constructed a luxurious hôtel particulier worth 400,000 francs for the family home, and a four-storey apartment

18

Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

building that generated an income of 20,000 francs annually.10 With the remaining capital, Martial père and three former partners of Cambry et Cie constructed ‘a complex of middle-income housing for artisans, shopkeepers and small-time professionals’ consisting of twenty-two buildings split equally among them.11 It was from Martial père’s share in this enterprise that Caillebotte was to inherit buildings on the rue des Deux-Gares. Inheriting wealth and deriving sufficient income from that capital not to have to earn income from labour, being a héritier and rentier, were not unusual positions within the class structure of the Third Republic and, indeed, the intergenerational transmission of capital, unhampered by any semblance of progressive taxation and undisturbed by the almost non-existent rate of inflation, was one of the key means by which class-determined inequality was solidified and extended during the Third Republic.12 Caillebotte was among the several hundred thousand who lived off unearned income, and was thus deeply embedded in what Thomas Piketty has characterized as a ‘society of rentiers’, being a direct beneficiary of a highly inegalitarian economy.13 Piketty’s seminal Capital in the Twenty First Century paints a stark picture of precisely how unequal the French (and especially the Parisian) economy was at this moment, data that help us understand the vast chasm of wealth that separated Caillebotte from the working men he painted tending his gardens, planing his floors and manning his yachts. While two thirds of the population died without leaving any wealth at all, the top centile’s share was 60 per cent.14 Wealth was ten times more concentrated than salaries, meaning that an inherited fortune in the top centile enabled a quality of life three times greater than those earning in the top centile of salaries; it paid far more to inherit well than earn well.15 As the rate of return on capital (around 4 to 6 per cent) greatly exceeded growth (which was essentially non-existent), inherited fortunes grew substantially faster than output and income; thus, it was essentially impossible for an individual to reach the top of the wealth pyramid through income derived from their labour alone.16 Moreover, the period of deflation lasting from the 1870s until the 1890s boosted the purchasing power of Caillebotte’s fixed income quite considerably, such that his peers tended to overestimate his income as being between 100,000 and 150,000 francs, around double what it likely was, assuming a 5 per cent return.17 The life of a rentier was defined by the absence of (the need to) work. For Littré he was a ‘bourgeois who lives off his returns, without a trade or industry’; for Larousse, he was ‘the man who lives off his returns[;] one can apply the name [rentier] to whomever possesses capital, property, or currency, which allows him to live without the need to work.’18 As Eugen Weber relates, the rentier, frequently a young man where inheritance was a factor, was understood as one who has ‘retired from business’, who ‘never … faced regular work at all’ and for whom the primary struggle was against ‘boredom’.19 The rentier was moreover understood as offering a conservative bulwark against revolutionary upheaval; as Larousse reports: ‘Governments … realized that the rentier was the complete opposite of a revolutionary; where the latter loves change and upheaval, the former dreads the smallest political variations, to the point of seeing cataclysm in a simple change of cabinet. Thus they [the government] reasoned: create as many rentiers as possible; govern, if you can, a society of rentiers.’20

 Work 19 Marrinan and Marnin Young, who are rare in devoting attention to the specificities of Caillebotte’s rentier status (as opposed to merely highlighting his wealth) assume that as a rentier Caillebotte, of necessity, internalized and identified with the conservative values ascribed that status. For Young, this manifest in Caillebotte imbuing in his pre1879 paintings ‘the slower, extended time of Realism’ (which he aligns with a conservative mindset favouring stable returns, opposed to the rapid temporality of speculation and finance capitalism he associates with Impressionism proper).21 For Marrinan, it manifest in a wholesale allegiance to the socio-economic basis of the bourgeois Republic, an untempered celebration of the delights of Haussmannization, and the least concern for those actually doing the work from which his comfort and prosperity derived.22 Marrinan identifies in Caillebotte’s painterly vision a powerful possessive dynamic and argues that painting offered Caillebotte a means to take symbolic possession of the objects, spaces, people and commodities to which his economic wealth entitled him. However, to extrapolate directly from Caillebotte’s class a certain mindset that forms the hermeneutic ground for reading the political economy of his paintings problematically overlooks the possibility for a disparity between Caillebotte’s structural class position and his imaginary relation to that position. Indeed, while they often noted Caillebotte’s wealth, his contemporaries were equally concerned to stress how hard he worked despite it. Eulogizing after Caillebotte’s death in 1894, Gustave Geffroy remembered that Caillebotte truly had conviction in him, and what he leaves surpasses the occupation of the amateur. He could have taken painting just as an excuse for the interludes of his life, and given himself the easy luxury and uselessness of a superficial painter. He was master of his time, sure of tomorrow, and he had a passion for gardening and boats. All the same he tied himself down [il s’astreignit, implying rigorous discipline] to the labour of painting.23

For Geffroy, it was precisely because Caillebotte subjected himself to the work of painting, because he compelled himself towards useful work and away from useless luxury, that he was spared from being marked by the stain of superficiality. Other critics too noted the incongruity between the lifestyle made possible by Caillebotte’s immense wealth and that which he had chosen for himself. For Georges Rivière, Caillebotte’s 1877 street scenes revealed ‘M. Caillebotte [to be] a worker, a hardy researcher, upon whom, I believe, one can place solid hopes’.24 When reviewing the Seventh Impressionist exhibition in 1882, Gaston Vassy was struck by Caillebotte’s ‘truly extraordinary activity. … His hat pushed back, hands in pockets, M. Caillebotte came and went giving orders, supervising the hanging of the paintings, and working like a porter, exactly as if he didn’t have an income of one hundred and fifty thousand francs’.25 Although Geffroy raised Caillebotte’s interests in gardening and yachting only as potential distractions, aligning them with unproductive luxury, his and Vassy’s comments nevertheless underscore the singular salience of hard work, both in terms of how Caillebotte went about painting and exhibiting and as a framework through which his personality and paintings were understood by his contemporaries. They

20

Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

clearly recognized that despite being absolved of the material need to work, Caillebotte nevertheless felt a certain compulsion to work, and derived a certain pleasure from working hard. Autoportrait au chevalet (Figure 1.1) is very much a scene of Caillebotte working in spite of his possessions. The plush floral sofa and specimens from Caillebotte’s collection of paintings – most prominently Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Bal du moulin de la Galette – visually crowd and compress the space, compete with Caillebotte for the viewer’s attention and compound the awkwardness and tentativeness of his pose. The viewer is presented with a scene of production but barred (within the logic of the scene) from discerning its product; thus stifled, the viewer’s desire to complete the causal chain is displaced onto the large Renoir, the only painting within the painting to which we have access. In this way, the creative subjectivity ostensibly evidenced by Caillebotte’s activity is in fact sublimated onto the product of another’s creative labour. In combining the already hybridized genres of the artist’s self-portrait and the collector’s portrait, Caillebotte plays on his own double identity as painter and collector. Yet, this double identity fails to condense into a whole, single form: Caillebotte, cut off at the knees, fragments into pieces of overdetermined fetishistic importance (the hand), disturbing absence (legs) and deliberate elision behind a barrier of thick, black, paint (crotch). Caillebotte’s possessions here actively detract from his ability to imagine and image himself as self-possessed. Conscious perhaps of this propensity on the part of his possessions to (unless properly managed) overwhelm the power of work to fabricate a coherent self-image, in

Figure 1.2 Gustave Caillebotte, Autoportrait, 1888–9. 55 × 46 cm, oil on canvas. Private Collection.

 Work 21 his later self-portraits – namely Autoportrait (Figure 1.2), from between 1888 and 1889, and Portrait de l’artiste (Plate 5), from around 1892 – Caillebotte instead completely abstracts himself from his material trappings. Although painted as much as four years apart these two paintings display a number of similarities: both represent a visibly middle-aged Caillebotte, with short grey hair and a trimmed beard, body facing threequarters to the viewer in a navy-blue overcoat, with his head turned to face us, against a monochromatic grey backdrop. In each, Caillebotte’s blank and impassive facial expression contrasts with his forthright and challenging gaze, creating an uneasy and ambiguous viewing experience. The sombre, cool and monochromatic tonality – the pale pinks and dark reds of the faces are almost overwhelmed by the neutral greys and deep blues of the backdrop and clothing – is paired with loose and evident brushwork, an uncomfortable amalgamation of the Impressionistic technique he developed in his landscapes of the 1880s and the almost monochromatic, blue-grey dominated tonality that characterized his work in the 1870s. However, where the visible brushwork of his (and his Impressionist comrades’) landscapes works to convey an impression of an instantaneous vision speedily recorded, here, and especially in the 1888–9 portrait, they give the opposite impression, connoting the thick texture of extended working. The visible brushstrokes draw attention not only to the object qualities of the painted image but also to the time spent working that object into an image, the application of pigment on canvas, and pigment on pigment, the building-up of the image steadily over time (Figure 1.2). Caillebotte’s blue-black overcoat is cast under a heavy shadow of oil paint and congeals around the lapels into an indistinguishable mass of black pigment: the iconic element of the paradigmatic uniform of the bourgeois gentlemen here takes on an almost crushing weight. Likewise, Caillebotte’s right eye is blackened and bruised by a thick mass of worked-up paint. The long, thin strokes with which Caillebotte rendered the detail of his face and hair, layered over flatter patches of flesh tones, convey the passing of time spent sitting and painting. Legible as signs of ageing (grey, thinning hair; skin imperfections), these marks connect the longer temporality of the life of the sitter with the shorter, but nevertheless extended, temporality of the process of painting. In juxtaposing these two temporalities Caillebotte subverts the normative meaning of Impressionist facture to produce a sombre and ambivalent portrait looking back on a life spent (among other things) painting. Caillebotte’s portraits of his friends and family share this cool and ‘wary reserve’.26 However, what distinguishes these self-portraits from Caillebotte’s paintings of his peers is that here he floats, isolated in a sea of grey, separate from the spaces and objects typically used to signify the sitter’s identity in portraiture. As Gloria Groom phrased it, Caillebotte deliberately captured his ‘family members … working at leisure’.27 The hard work of, for example, playing the piano (Figure 0.1) is what makes the figure of Martial cohere into a recognizable, representable and altogether graspable form. Likewise, the salient characteristic of leisure activities such as needlework (Figure 1.3) or reading (Figure 1.4), either in Paris or in Yerres (Figure 7.4), in Caillebotte’s view, is the intense attention to detail it required: leisure, like work, is something to which one must give oneself over completely. The physical pressure of fingers on keys and of feet on pedals structures Martial’s upright body (Figure 0.1); his absorbed and alert attention

22

Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

Figure 1.3  Gustave Caillebotte, Portrait de Madame Martial Caillebotte, 1877. 83 × 72 cm, oil on canvas. Private Collection.

Figure 1.4 Gustave Caillebotte, Intérieur, femme lisant, 1880. 65 × 81 cm, oil on canvas. Private Collection.

 Work 23 on the sheet music, indexing the mental effort required, provides a convenient and unchallenging foil for our spectatorship. The required equipment and paraphernalia offer object-indexes of the sitter’s individual subjectivity, unique talents and personal interests, fleshing out an imaginary inner life. Likewise, when painting his mother, aunts, cousins and friends, their leisure gives them a focus for their mental and bodily attention, inculcating an absorption that facilitates the gaze of the painter and the need of the viewer to identify with the sitter. Where Edmond Duranty theorized about the character of La Nouvelle Peinture in 1876, it was precisely in creating a matrix offering a coherent relation of bodies, objects and spaces that meaning was to be ideally produced: ‘A back should reveal temperament, age, and social condition; a pair of hands should reveal the magistrate or merchant; a gesture should reveal the entire range of feeling. … Hands kept in pockets can be eloquent. … An atmosphere is thus created in every interior, likewise a personal character taken up amongst all the furniture and objects that fill it.’28 In breaking this mould by painting these decontextualized self-portraits, Caillebotte gives his viewer no foothold in their attempts to read the painting and understand the subjectivity it conveys. Divorced and isolated from the material ground of bourgeois life and identity, the ‘Caillebotte’ that Caillebotte presents is a serious, enigmatic and fundamentally pathos-inducing figure. The lack of an extrinsic system of reference within which it would be possible to comprehend the figure of Caillebotte in his social dimension channels the attention of the viewer exclusively onto the figure of Caillebotte himself. However, his stony expression blunts this now increasingly inquisitive gaze, giving the impression not of a full inner life from which we are being kept but precisely the opposite, the very lack of this subjective richness. Yet, as Autoportrait au chevalet (Figure 1.1) demonstrated, even the objects of his home and tools of his trade aren’t the absolute guarantees of subjective coherency or fulfilment that Duranty would have us believe them to be. Thus, the self-portraits examined thus far bear witness to a consistent but ultimately frustrated effort on the part of Caillebotte to figure visually a sense of himself through the process of painting. It was not only in self-portraits that Caillebotte worked himself into his paintings: the central figure on the Pont de l’Europe (Figure 3.1) has been widely identified as a representation of Caillebotte himself; Anthea Callen has likewise argued that the central male figure in Rue de Paris (Plate 2) bears a clear resemblance to a late self-portrait.29 Less obviously, in canvases such as Le Déjeuner (Figure 2.1), it is the empty plate at the foot of the image, with could only be for him, that signals the artist’s investments in the scene he represents. The subjects of his paintings too – his domestic spaces, friends, the streets close to his house and family – acquire their identity only in relation to the artist: the objects and spaces possessed, used and collected by the artist stand in for him in his paintings, operating as subjective surrogates. In these paintings, Caillebotte metaphorically extends his identity to encompass the objects of his creation and collection. Most significantly, Caillebotte encoded into his paintings signifiers of the process, the work of painting, sometimes in the guise of the material application of pigment to a surface – evoked in the iconography of Autoportrait au chevalet (Figure 1.1) and the materiality of Autoportrait (Figure 1.2) and Portrait de

24

Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

l’artiste (Plate 5) – and at other moments in the ostentatious foregrounding of detail, finish and perspectival artificiality. In Jeune homme au piano (Figure 0.1), for example, Caillebotte imputes an ‘intensity’ to the ostensibly reposeful scene by distorting the perspective so dramatically that critics feared that ‘at any moment’ the piano might slide forwards and ‘[crush]’ this ‘young man’.30 In Pont de l’Europe (Figure 3.1), as I examine in detail in Chapter 3, Caillebotte deconstructed and iteratively recomposed fragments of space not only in a way that bears the trace of what I call his philatelic visuality but also in a manner that calls attention to the artificiality of his means of representation. Likewise, in Les raboteurs de parquet (Plate 1) Caillebotte deforms space according to an off-centre vanishing point and raised horizon line such that the foreground pitches up almost parallel to the picture plane; in Chapter 6, I argue that this gambit is evidence of a desire on the part of Caillebotte to fuse his work with that of the labourers he depicts, relying on an analogy of their shared labour as consisting in the chromatic transformation of a surface by means of the skilful manipulation of matter with tools. The clear allusion that Les Peintres en bâtiment (1877) makes to Caillebotte’s own craft by, firstly, ‘literally foreground[ing] the physical labour of painting’ in its ‘extraordinarily tactile paint matière and visible brittle-brush facture’ and, secondly, by encoding a pun on the phrase peinture d’impression (which in ‘the housepainter’s manual … is the term used for the first coat of paint applied by the worker’ as well as signifying the Impressionist painter’s work), was noticed by Caillebotte’s contemporaries as well as more recent scholars.31 Thus, by means of his attention to visual detail, unconcealed materiality and bizarre perspectives, Caillebotte worked to call attention to his own labour as an artist – and thus worked himself into these paintings – in direct contradistinction to the Impressionist elision of the work of painting in favour of a rapid and instinctual painterly praxis. Much has been written about Caillebotte’s liminal, fractured, alienated or melancholic psyche. The sombre, almost monochromatic palette of his early works, the dearth of meaningful social interaction in his paintings, his excavation of bourgeois domestic ennui and his awkward portraits have all been read as products of a painter not completely at ease with himself or his social world. Caillebotte’s liminality, his status as the ‘Odd Man In’, the ‘Man in the Middle’, his never quite belonging, is a standard topos in scholarship on the artist.32 Typically, this connection has emerged in relation to, on the one hand, the subjectivity-fracturing newness of modernité, and, on the other hand, the multiple disconnects between his social-aesthetic allegiance to the Impressionist cause, the perceived expectations of his class and family and his own idiosyncratic vision. Linda Nochlin, for example, has highlighted the fragmenting potentiality of modernity in relation to representations of the body. In her 1994 book The Body in Pieces she argued that modernity was marked by a loss of wholeness and a sense of social, psychological and metaphysical fragmentation.33 She identifies in Impressionism’s fluid and open structures, their sense of flow and dynamism, the feeling of the world simultaneously falling apart and congealing together.34 Hesitant to offer a generalized theory of ‘the fragment’, Nochlin instead intervenes in specific instances of its appearance: Caillebotte’s evident brushwork which fragments and yet totalizes, the cut-up body of Degas’s ballet scenes or Manet’s

 Work 25 fetishistic insistence on cropping in Masked Ball at the Opera (1873).35 Although she identifies Caillebotte’s concern to represent the dynamics of class, Nochlin underplays both how much, for Caillebotte, processes of fragmentation and totalization were mutually and dialectically indispensable, each signifying in relation to the other, and how far it was the work of painting as a process that mediated, enacted and signified Caillebotte’s oscillation between feelings of socio-subjective wholeness and fracture. Often, therefore, Caillebotte’s restrained but impossibly fractured pictorial worlds, which exist between or extend across multiple perspectives and moments, are seen to reflect (more or less straightforwardly) a psyche fractured, like so many others, by modernity. However, drawing such a straightforward causal relationship raises a significant problem of interpretation with regard to an ambitious, complex and oft-overlooked self-portrait that Caillebotte painted only shortly before his death, Régates à Argenteuil (Plate 3), which stands alone as an ultimately successful expression of a Caillebotte lacking neither social position nor subjective fullness. In order to account for the success with which this late painting visualizes the virtuoso successes of Caillebotte, connecting him to the social and sporting milieu within which he excelled and depicting an unfractured but nevertheless complex and reflexive employer–employee/ worker–bourgeois dynamic, it is necessary to situate Caillebotte’s painterly practice securely among his other labours: collecting and yachting. Although not usually grouped among his self-portraits, Régates à Argenteuil depicts Caillebotte himself nonchalantly piloting a sailing vessel using only a single digit, ostentatiously demonstrating his mastery over his craft, his competition and the assortment of other racing yachts on the Seine. Our viewpoint, presumably on a boat in the middle of the river, looking down its length, generates the plunging linear perspective familiar from his earlier scenes of Parisian public spaces. The banks on either side are all but obscured by the edges of the canvas and by the sails of the boats, save for a small sliver of green in front of a solitary tree on the left and traces of architectural details on the right. Thus, the eye is bounded to the space of the river and is invited to weave a path from boat to boat, gradually recessing into perspectival depth and finally reaching the haze of blue in the far distance, which arrests the process. Overlaying these devices of depth is an orthogonal-grid structure which both functions to organize the spatial relations of objects within the frame, and snaps the eye back to the surface of the canvas. The horizon line bisects the canvas, creating two areas of broadly equal size, delineated through varying tones and hues of blue. The more impasto and rough texture, denoting reflections of boats distorted by the movement of the water, contrasts with the smooth, feathered brushwork through which the strangely (almost) monochromatic and featureless sky is depicted. The erect masts of the yachts form the vertical counterpoint to the horizon line, creating an uplifting sense of verticality, and completing the structuring grid. The portrait-orientation of the canvas gives space to, and compounds, this sense of verticality. The only mast to cut across this structure is that of Roastbeef, the vessel piloted by Caillebotte, whose dynamic diagonal inclination marks it as a singular element of movement in an otherwise curiously static arrangement. As well as facilitating the

26

Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

dynamic interplay of surface and depth which is a hallmark of Caillebotte’s artistic vision, our viewpoint here serves a narrative purpose: Caillebotte locates the viewer in a boat, facing down river, as Roastbeef zips into view from the right; we thus get the impression of being overtaken, surpassed, by one of the greatest French yachtsmen of his generation, who peers back at his vanquished foe, secure in his mastery of his vessel (the object of his design and possession) and dominance over us. Putting this late self-portrait into conversation with his earlier attempts to paint himself, and contextualizing it within his collecting practices, complicates a straightforward reading of this painting as an image of a well-to-do man at leisure, expressing his artistic and sporting virtuosity. Caillebotte is only able to visualize a subjectivity that appears neither alienated nor fractured in this painting because he is successful in his attempt to effect a complex synthesis between the work of painting and the work depicted in the painting. It is this challenge that Caillebotte faced and failed in his earlier self-portraits. What emerges in this contextualized reading is the extent to which Caillebotte worked through a social and subjective sense of self by painting, and the extent to which this process of self-production, firstly, complemented and mirrored the subject-producing power of objects that made collecting so significant and, secondly, depended on the structuring principles of the collection for its visual and conceptual coherency and legibility. My point is not simply that Caillebotte, as a cultural worker, produced a sense of subjectivity through painting, nor that this subjectivity was fractured or alienated in important ways, but further and crucially, that Caillebotte’s self-portraits demonstrate that it was in the work of painting – its complex points of connection to his collecting practice and wider ideological context – that this fractured or alienated subjectivity was experienced and, potentially, resolved. What it meant to work and to be a worker was one of the crucial problems facing French society in the late nineteenth century, pulling into its orbit other problematics related to class, society, masculinity, representation and corporeality. The ostensible ideological goals and values of the Third Republican State – its commitments to liberal capitalism, democracy, secularism and social harmony – relied upon its capacity to foster a collective and phantasmic experience of the social whole as a closed and harmonious totality, which in turn necessitated the exclusion of the reality of inevitable class antagonism from its symbolic and phantasmic landscapes.36 In this context, therefore, Caillebotte’s attempts to resolve his ambivalence towards his own class inheritance became all the more urgent. While our understanding of Caillebotte has now progressed past John Rewald’s characterization of him as a ‘[millionaire who] also painted in his spare time’, that is, we now take him seriously as a painter, the question of why Caillebotte painted is rarely posed.37 For Caillebotte’s class peers, the economic stagnation of this period (which actually secured their relative wealth) ‘strengthened a natural distaste for work. Young men who in earlier times might have entered some sort of career, now made haste more slowly.’38 Yet, as Gaston Vassy noticed, Caillebotte did not behave in the way one might expect of a man of his station, he worked ‘like a porter, exactly as if he didn’t have an income of one hundred and fifty thousand francs’.39 If the normative

 Work 27 expectation of a man of his position was ‘to live without the need to work’, then why did Caillebotte act as if he couldn’t? Why did he choose to ‘[tie] himself down to the labour of painting’?40 Even Marrinan – who identifies Caillebotte’s haute bourgeois upbringing and economic dependence on the capitalist economy as the overriding determinants of his world view, and therefore his artistic vision, and who offers a compelling and intricate account of how Caillebotte forged a circuitous route to painterly maturity (‘Caillebotte came to modernity via Vermeer’) so as not to be forced to repudiate the conservative expectations of his family – doesn’t foreground this issue.41 While arguing that pursuing an artistic career ‘was thought appropriate by the family’s social peers’ – especially given Caillebotte’s choice of the respectable and conservative Léon Bonnat as master – Marrinan nevertheless admits (without expanding) the potential for incompatibility between the identity of the ‘diligent worker’ it implied and Caillebotte’s class background, the former only becoming fully available to Caillebotte after the death of his mother.42 The question of what, if not the need for an income, drove Caillebotte to paint and exhibit in a manner even his contemporaries understood as being analogous to labour (as opposed to say, a diversion, distraction from boredom, or hobby) must moreover be considered in light of the fact that art was not Caillebotte’s overriding obsession – as it was for some of his peers, for example Paul Cézanne or Camille Pissarro – nor his only pursuit. Indeed, while Caillebotte published voluminously about yachting and philately, he was curiously silent about matters of art. From this perspective, rather than ‘why did Caillebotte work at painting?’, the question can more helpfully be posed as ‘why did Caillebotte work at all’? In approaching this question, it is vital to maintain a distinction between the Third Republic’s ideological self-presentation as a ‘society of workers’ – the invitation, extended through its normative, often state-sponsored, cultural forms, for everyone, regardless of their class, to identify as a worker – and the economic structure – Piketty’s ‘society of rentiers’ – that that fantasy concealed and supported.43 For bourgeois men like Caillebotte, their labour-power was uncoupled from material necessity – there was no economic need to work – and the identity position of ‘worker’ as it was ideologically constituted was (partially) uncoupled from the capitalist economy in the context of which the labour took place, ‘worker’ as participant in the economic structure. Indeed, within that economy, as wages stagnated and capital prospered, labour and wealth pooled in sharply divergent, antagonistic, constituencies; as I discuss in Chapter 5, the Third Republic cultivated an understanding of work that elided wealth, instead figuring it as a universal moral duty, a communal endeavour that produced a shared identity and therefore social harmony. Therefore, we must take care to distinguish between work as it functioned within the economy – in relation to concrete structures of class determined by one’s relation to the means of production – and work as it functioned for ideology. Doing work and being a worker were acutely multivalent endeavours that overlapped without being isomorphic, and that had multiple points of reference, none of which were completely totalizing. In addition to the fact that it problematically underplays the conviction and nuance with which Caillebotte painted, the multivalencies of class, labour and wealth in the Third Republic demonstrate the

28

Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

inadequacy of understanding Caillebotte as a millionaire dilettante who never worked a day in his life, since to hold this position is to depend on an overly delimited definition of work that excludes the capacity of ideology to condition the ways in which concrete socio-economic structures and processes are parsed by individuals. Demonstrating this multivalence, semantic slippages between the discursive categories of artist and worker were integral both to the ways in which the subjects, materials and techniques of modern painting were understood and to how certain modern painters understood themselves as such. For viewers and artists alike, it was by recourse to the language of labour – by comparing, for example, Gustave Courbet’s use of the palette knife to that of a plasterer or mason using a trowel, or by disparaging Cézanne’s tache with that of the lowly sign-painter – that the terms of modern painting’s anti-academicism became clear.44 In addition, as Anthea Callen argues, it was by performatively styling themselves – through language, dress, manners and plein-air work – as uncultured, provincial craftsmen, aloof to bourgeois, Parisian sensibilities that artists like Courbet, Cézanne and Pissarro enacted and redoubled the authenticity of their unapologetically coarse matière and facture.45 Joachim Pissarro has highlighted how their shared ‘infectious and chronic obsession with work’ cemented the productive relationship between Cézanne and Pissarro and conditioned the ways in which critics like Émile Zola understood its products.46 ‘I got to understand Pissarro properly,’ Cézanne reported to Joachim Gasquet. ‘He’s a painter just like me. … He was a fanatic. A compulsive love of work got hold of me then [in the 1880s].’47 Echoing Pissarro’s obsession with working at painting – ‘Painting, art in general, enchants me: this is my life. The rest doesn’t matter’ – Cézanne was compelled ‘to work always’ and for its own sake, ‘not in order to reach a finished state (which the idiots cherish)’.48 This ‘critical emphasis on work per se’ relates to their belief in the necessity of work for the realization of one’s self; for Pissarro and Cézanne, compulsive work formed the ontological basis of subjectivity.49 My understanding of Caillebotte similarly hinges upon his compulsion to engage in activities that he experienced as labour or labour-like and on the centrality of these activities as active elements of a holistic process by which he came to inhabit a social sense of self. For Cézanne and Pissarro, however, the activity of painting and the work of art were not synonymous, but rather distinguished by the extent to which the finished product was imbued with the authentic ‘sensation’ of the artist before nature, understood to constitute an indexical trace of individuality.50 Where a painter eschewed the truth of his observations in favour of merely reproducing the received rules of art, his paintings were anything but. When Pissarro and Cézanne spoke of themselves as stuck on serious work they therefore referred much more to the struggle to realize their sensations and generate artistic subjectivities than to the physical practicalities of ‘exécution’.51 Within this discursive framework, the word ‘work’ carries meaning only in so far as it is understood to be artistic work, since it is only by producing art that the worker brings into being his subjectivity and fulfils the function and purpose of working. Thus, when Zola referred to Cézanne and Pissarro as ‘workers’ in the press, it was because they appeared to be working to develop a praxis of his theory of art as ‘a corner of creation seen through a temperament’.52

 Work 29 The varying ways in which Cézanne and Pissarro’s Impressionist colleagues styled themselves, were styled, or eschewed identification as being workers, and their activity as doing work, further demonstrates the polysemy of work, its slippery salience as an ideological category within artistic discourse. Spurred by a shared dissatisfaction with the hegemony of the Salon and the arbitrary capriciousness of its jury, the idea for an independent exhibiting association had circulated among the young painters that would go on to form the Impressionist group since at least 1867.53 On 5 May 1873, the socialist critic Paul Alexis (like Cézanne a close childhood friend of Zola) published a polemical essay in the Republican newspaper L’avenir national which gave vent to their frustration. For Alexis, the conditions of modern industrial society rendered extant distinctions between artists and workers moot: they were both simply different varieties of producers. Consequently, if the artist was to step down from the Academic ‘ivory tower’ and ‘plant his feet in modern life, be at one with his time so as to share its struggles’, it was to factory workers, specifically their associations, that he ought to look for inspiration.54 It was up to the artist to embrace the reality of his being a worker and to band together as workers with shared interests to break the government’s stranglehold on the arts. Alexis’s article was received enthusiastically by the protoImpressionists, and a week later he published a letter sent to him by Claude Monet confirming that he was in the process of establishing one such artists’ association.55 It was in the context of this critical discourse, in which the very modernity of the modern artist seemed to hinge on his collapsing of distinctions between art and other forms of labour, that the proto-Impressionists – a group including Monet, Pissarro, Degas, Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Armand Guillaumin, Édouard Béliard, Ludovic-Napoléon Lepic, Henri Rouart, and the enamellist Alfred Meyer – formed the Société anonyme coopérative des artistes-peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs on 27 December 1873.56 Perhaps conscious too of how Courbet had elucidated his rebellion against the Academy as a recovery of art’s only recently displaced craft heritage, the group’s charter was based on that of a bakers’ union in Pissarro’s hometown of Pontoise and enshrined open access, democratic governance and randomly assigned hanging positions. When the société anonyme mounted its first exhibition the following year, the press was undecided on how to label them: for critics like Louis Leroy and Jules-Antoine Castagnary, they were ‘Impressionists’, whereas for others, including Jules Claretie and Ernest Chesneau, the term ‘Intransigeant’ seemed a better fit.57 In the critical discourse of the 1870s, the term ‘impression’ signified ambivalently: in the context of fine art it connoted simultaneously the artist’s visual sensation before nature, the accepted technique of using colour patches or notes to render visible these sensations, the flat priming layer that prepared the canvas for that rendering and the attitude of individualism underpinning the entire exercise; for printmakers it signified both the print and the mechanical action by which it was produced; and ‘peinture d’impression’ identified the profession of artisan decorators that were to be depicted by Caillebotte (Figure 3.2).58 In contrast, ‘Intransigeant’ had a highly specific, and politically charged, meaning: it was a direct reference to the anarchist wing of the Spanish Federalist Party of 1872

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Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

(los intransigentes) who, by their refusal to countenance compromise and desire to topple the Savoyard constitutional monarchy by means of a general strike, precipitated a civil war. French conservatives, including Presidents Adolphe Thiers and Patrice de MacMahon, were gravely concerned: having only recently quashed the Paris Commune, it appeared as if its exiled leaders might succeed in establishing another Commune just beyond France’s borders. While the group were defeated in January 1874, their name survived, and came to offer both critics and supporters of the new painting a means of describing their iconoclastic sweeping away of Academic tradition.59 For critics like Louis Enault and Marius Chaumelin, the principles of the new painting were – troublingly – derived directly from those of the radical workers’ movement.60 For the poet Stéphane Mallarmé writing in 1876, Impressionism’s ‘energetic modern worker[s]’ offered a ‘newness of vision’ that, in being ‘radical and democratic’ – therefore ‘Intransigeant’ – was explicitly related to the new ‘participation of a hitherto ignored people in the political life of France’.61 Although, in these early years, the Impressionists themselves demurred, leaving the identity of the group indeterminate vis-à-vis these two poles, the modernity of their art was tethered to a critical understanding of their activity as a form of labour with an inherent political connotation. Making a rather overt allusion to the prevalence of barricades in Paris’s long history of revolutionary insurrections, as well as recent political events in Spain, Albert Wollf indicated that whatever ‘these so-called artists name themselves’, be it ‘the Intransigents [or] the Impressionists’, ‘they [nevertheless] barricade themselves behind their own inadequacy.’62 Caillebotte himself recognized this indeterminacy, making provision in his 1876 will for ‘an exhibition of the painters called Intransigeant or Impressionist’.63 By 1877, ‘the painters called Intransigeant or Impressionist’ were forced, for reasons of commercial strategy, to definitively pick the latter: due to the rising political tensions exemplified by the battle between Clemenceau and Gambetta, the former had become anathema to the mainstream, bourgeois Republican market they were at that point actively courting.64 Although it carried less of an overt political charge, the materiality of the Impressionist technique nevertheless continued to connote the labour of the artist, the time spent working up the object. Moreover, the multiple meanings of the term ‘impression’ retained a link to craft labour that critics would continue to find pertinent, and on which Caillebotte himself would play (Figure 3.2). In her reading of Berthe Morisot’s Wet Nurse, Linda Nochlin too highlighted how the palpably legible ‘traces of [Morisot’s] manual activity’ – her sketchy, loose and visible brushwork – are most clearly understood as signifiers of painterly labour that draw analogies between the (gendered) work of representation and the (gendered) work represented (that of the wet nurse).65 Given this discursive and aesthetic context, it is perhaps not surprising that labour offered Caillebotte a means of understanding and inhabiting his practice as an artist in ways that also functioned to provide loci around which a sense of social self could ossify. Caillebotte’s identification in work’s multiple shades the alpha and omega of his class-bound alienation was made possible, and thus inflected, by his class-generated privilege. However, from his unique, liminal vantage point within

 Work 31 the ideological coordinates of his social universe – itself structured around this same paradoxical obfuscation of the relationships between wealth, work, and class – there was no necessary antagonism, for Caillebotte if not for his contemporaries, between Caillebotte-the-rentier and Caillebotte-the-ouvrier. As Caillebotte never really engaged with the art market into which his Impressionist peers were thrusting themselves headlong, the economy of his desire in identifying himself as a worker was never put in the peril of contact with the economy of exchange it ostensibly referenced. The work of Caillebotte’s fellow Impressionists was routinely tested in a marketplace for which value, at least in part, depended on how much work the commodity for sale had taken to produce.66 However, the painterly work many collectors valued consisted in effacing all traces of the painterly process; consequently, the highly finished (léché) surfaces of Academic art, paradoxically, for them signalled that more work had taken place than the looser surfaces of Impressionism. The commercial necessity of negotiating this discrepancy between how they and the market understood the work they were doing complicated the ways in which Impressionists positioned the work of painting vis-àvis the related categories of craft and skill. In being insulated from these problematics, Caillebotte was able to imagine collecting and painting as forms of labour (and as being analogous to one another, having a shared basis in the economy of his desire, if not necessarily in the economy itself) in quite different ways, and for highly idiosyncratic ends, than his peers. Carol E. Harrison has emphasized the significance of sociability as a kind of cultural performance constitutive of class; for Caillebotte, the work of his various extra-artistic activities, and the sociability they implied, constituted an arena in which he was able to performatively reconfigure his class identity.67 It seems likely that Gustave was introduced to boating by Alfred Sisley in 1876. In that same year, he became a member of the Cercle de la Voile de Paris (CVP), a small club for sailing enthusiasts, which became ‘one of the most prestigious and active clubs’ of the late nineteenth century.68 Caillebotte purchased his first boat, Iris, in 1878, and would own thirteen more before his death in 1894.69 It was in the late 1870s that he began to race seriously, making a name for himself as one of the most successful yachtsmen in France.70 Not satisfied with merely racing, Caillebotte exerted himself to make a lasting impact on the sport of yachting: he was a founding subscriber of Le Yacht, the first French review on boating, launched on 16 March 1878; he was instrumental in the organization and institutionalization of the sport; designed the world’s first truly international handicapping system (la jauge Caillebotte); financed a dedicated, modern and high quality racing yacht yard on the Seine near his own house, so that he could supervise closely the labourers realizing his designs (the Chantier Luce); invented a new class of sailing vessel (based on a sail area of 30 m2); and designed twenty-five boats (most of them between 1890 and 1893) which revolutionized French sailing with their thoroughly modern, and often experimental, designs.71 It was on his visits to the Normandy coast that Caillebotte began exploring the aesthetic possibilities of yachting, in paintings dating from the early 1880s, such as Marine, régates à Villers (Figure 1.5), Voiliers en mer and La mer vue de Villerville. Focusing on sea, rather than river, regattas, these paintings adopt the distanced

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Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

Figure 1.5  Gustave Caillebotte, Marine, régates à Villers, c. 1880. 75 × 101 cm, oil on canvas. Private Collection. viewpoint of a land-based observer. As such, the paintings take on the abstract and decorative dimension of small-scale yachts, identifiable by their triangular sails, dotted across loosely delineated sea and sky. As his 1884 Régates en mer à Villerville indicates, in Normandy, Caillebotte seems to have been interested in the yachts as decorative backdrop, a means to liven up a seascape. Upon his return to Argenteuil, the change from painting yachts at sea to those on the Seine enabled a closer and more detailed view, pulling the paintings back from the brink of abstraction. However, Caillebotte’s interest remained squarely on the form of the yacht, their curved hulls, sweeping lines and triangular sails, rather than on the narrative potentialities of representing a race or on the physical and visual dynamism of the racers themselves. He often chose to represent boats at anchor or moored: in paintings such as La Seine à Argenteuil, bateaux au mouillage and Le bassin d’Argenteuil Caillebotte deliberately elides the drama of the race and instead produces static, rectilinear compositions, focusing on the recession of the river diagonally across the image surface and into perspectival space and on the verticality of the masts. These scenes are often depopulated, giving the impression of downtime, or rest: any action takes place outside of the frame. These yachts, which Caillebotte has captured at moments of uncharacteristic stillness, are subjected to his careful, analytical and expert eye. Caillebotte seems drawn to the visual and compositional possibilities of representing static, sail-less yachts, pictured in a river viewed at an angle such that the surface-oriented orthogonal arrangement of horizontal riverbank and vertical masts plays off against the recession of the river itself into pictorial space. The obvious correspondences to draw here are the plunging perspective of Caillebotte’s monumental street scenes, the bizarre spaces of his interiors and the idiosyncratic views of Paris from above. However, that dynamic oscillation between surface and depth isn’t nearly as effective in the yacht images: Caillebotte is able to produce surface structure (Bateaux à l’ancre sur la Seine, after 1882) or plunging depth (La berge du Petit Gennevilliers, 1884), but rarely both together (as he had so successfully achieved in paintings such as Rue de Paris; temps de pluie [Plate 2] and Le Pont de l’Europe [Figure 3.1]).

 Work 33 Daniel Charles has stressed the aesthetic dimension to Caillebotte’s boat designs, the sensual pleasure and linear economy of their curving forms.72 Jean Chardeau, Kirk Varnedoe and Christopher Lloyd have all emphasized the chronically underappreciated role drawing played in Caillebotte’s painterly practice and argued that his conscientious and meticulous draughtsmanship indicates a degree of concordance with the highesteem drawing held in traditional academic practice.73 Though, by the 1880s, Caillebotte had dispensed with the tight academic finish of his earlier paintings, his paintings of yachts in this period evidence the draughtsmanly prism through which Caillebotte came to yacht design, and his focus on a purely ocular modality of perception. This quiet stillness and technical, visual focus on the form and design of the sailing vessels distinguishes these paintings from Caillebotte’s slightly earlier (and better known) scenes of rowing and fishing on the Caillebotte family’s Yerres estate. These paintings of Périssoires sur l’Yerres instead position the viewer close to the action, probably on a skiff in the middle of the river. The low-profile skiffs glide through the water in a direction of travel which moves the eye across the canvas with the flow of the river; the viewer’s gaze sweeps across the scene – pleasingly and soothingly coloured in a harmonious palette of blues, greens, yellows, and whites – experiencing no disjunction between the path it is invited to weave into the scene and the believability and coherency of the space through which it moves. The serial repetition of the motif of the rower, diminishing in scale, but essentially identical, signifies this progressive movement through space. This interplay between compositional lines of force and the narrative flow implied by the iconography is most eloquently expressed in Périssoires sur l’Yerres of 1878 (Figure 1.6), with the périssoires moving into and slightly across the canvas, from its bottom left, as if they have darted through our peripheral vision, overtaking us. Unlike the images of yachts he was to produce some years later, these paintings visualize the corporeal experience of rowing, focusing on human-powered movement, the strain and resistance of the oars in water, connecting the dynamism of the composition with the work of the rowers. Although made manifest as a visual spectacle, paintings such as Canotiers ramant sur l’Yerres of 1877 (Figure 1.7), which positions the viewer precariously in the very boat we see being propelled by two rowers whose identical attire reveals the musculature of their straining arms, make explicit the routing of this visuality through a phenomenology of movement indexed to effort. Paradoxically, it was only after Caillebotte had gained expertise in designing his own racing yachts that his paintings of them started to register the corporeal dynamism completely missing from his first versions of the motif. It was certainly not the case that Caillebotte was unfamiliar with the cut and thrust of racing, since, by the 1890s, when this shift in his painting occurred, he had been seriously racing for over a decade. It was his immersion in the two-dimensional world of pure line, animated primarily, as Caillebotte’s innovative designs indicate, by the interplay between rectilinear and curvilinear forms in a space bounded by the orthogonal grid, that acted as one catalyst for this formal shift in his painting.74 The studies for Régates à Argenteuil (Plate 3) evidence the attention Caillebotte paid to the form and position of Roastbeef relative to the overall composition and to the

34

Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

Figure 1.6  Gustave Caillebotte, Périssoires sur l’Yerres, 1878. 157 × 113 cm, oil on canvas. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes. viewer. He made numerous sketches in oil before eventually settling on the careening and powerful diagonal cutting position that gives the finished work its narrative clarity, personal importance and compositional dynamism. In one sketch, Caillebotte strains at the limits of pictorial believability by reversing the direction of Roastbeef, showing the vessel at an extreme pitch, such that it barely appears to touch the water, almost threatening to topple. This extreme instability is exacerbated by its evidently imminent exit from the picture. The snapshot-like quality of this sketch – which reads in a manner analogous to the way in which the photographic image could freeze motion, producing seemingly improbable and novel scenes not otherwise discernible to the human eye – throws the more carefully constructed finished work into sharp focus. The fundamental structure of the repeating verticals, and the recession of the river to a slightly offset vanishing point that nonetheless preserves the horizontality of the riverbank or horizon, remained an important anchoring point across his preparatory works. However, even having drawn from his Yerres-period images in order to impart a sense of narrative action and convey his skills as both a yachtsman and a naval

 Work 35

Figure 1.7  Gustave Caillebotte, Canotiers ramant sur l’Yerres, 1877. 81 × 116 cm, oil on canvas. Private Collection, France.

Figure 1.8  Gustave Caillebotte, Autoportrait à la barre, c. 1893. 47 × 31 cm, pencil on paper. Private Collection © Comité Caillebotte, Paris. architect (as well as a painter), the lightness with which Caillebotte controls his vessel problematizes a phenomenological reading. Adopting a pose carefully worked out in an earlier study (Figure 1.8), Caillebotte (Plate 3) extends only a single digit in the direction of the yacht’s rudder, gesturing towards it, rather than making a solid connection. What appears at first glance to be an image of Caillebotte piloting the

36

Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

vessel is in fact one of him merely gesticulating towards it, drawing our attention to his effortless prowess. Régates à Argenteuil depicts Caillebotte sailing Roastbeef, a vessel of his own design, in the experimental 30 m2 class of his own invention, constructed under his supervision in the dock he financed, and which he raced with remarkable success. Roastbeef, among Caillebotte’s most cherished yachts, thus functions as a material extension of Caillebotte’s self.75 Caillebotte here depicts himself living through the objects of his possession and creation. As Walter Benjamin has emphasized, the most intimate method of acquisition for the collector is the creation of the object itself.76 In identifying himself so closely with the object of his design, to which he physically connects himself through the touch of his fingertip, Caillebotte erects a social identity on the basis of an object-relation. This disjunctive chronology highlights the problematical consequences of reading Caillebotte’s yachting pictures as straightforwardly analogous to his rowing images, as expressing Caillebotte’s ‘fundamental fascinations – with movement, dynamics, and speed, the beauty of the modern’.77 When Caillebotte returned to the visuality of movement, dynamics and speed in this late self-portrait (Plate 3), he did so in a structured, ocular modality rather than a phenomenological one. It is through the ordered repetition of elements in a grid-like structure that Caillebotte constructs the visual world (and the social context it ostensibly indexes) within which his objectdependent subjectivity takes recognizable form, guarding him against the unbounded and uncontrollable excesses of his earlier studies. The serial repetition of verticals, drawn from his earlier paintings of yachts without owners, here do not connote the same formulaic and stilted stasis, but rather weave together an orderly scene out of the maelstrom of competitive racing. The elision of the corporeal dynamics associated with rowing – the shift into an ocular register that permits only the lightest of touches – complicates the relation of this painting to structures of work. Patrick Shaw Cable has argued that Caillebotte’s yachting and rowing activities were characterized by the confluence of the physical work of sporting activity and the experience of class mixing.78 Yachting, as with sport more generally, registered the contemporaneous shifts in the class structure of nineteenth-century French society.79 Boating developed primarily on rivers and around the French coast in the middle of the nineteenth century, and was dominated by aristocratic values and the desire for sociability. However, with the increasing participation of the leisured bourgeoisie, boating became primarily about equal athletic competition.80 By the 1880s, middle-class yachting clubs, not least the CVP and the Union des yachts français (UYF), began to displace the older, elite circle and instituted rules excluding the lower classes from their regattas. In this context, what the Régates à Argenteuil (Plate 3) depicts therefore is not a scene of class mixing or phenomenological harmony – the grand unification of classes through the shared endeavour of work that was the utopic dream of Republican ideology – but rather a complex scene of work and sociability between employer and his employee. Caillebotte kept a sailor on permanent retainer as part of the staff of his Petit Gennevilliers house; one of Martial’s photographs represents Caillebotte and Joseph, his sailor, paddling

 Work 37 out towards Roastbeef.81 It thus seems reasonable to suppose that the second figure represented in Roastbeef in Régates à Argenteuil is Joseph. I have been arguing that Caillebotte experienced his alienation from normative bourgeois society and from Third Republican ideology in terms of class and work, a distance made particularly acute by the fundamental significance of shared work which underpinned the Republican fantasy of social harmony. As such, his paintings on the theme of work materialize his hesitancy to confront the theme head on, and are built up from a series of displacements, transferences and blockages which trap Caillebotte in an endless circuit of working at art. In this late self-portrait then, we witness the elision of work as a process of physical effort, its bounding within symbolic structuring processes which drew from the (false) labour of collecting, examined in detail in the following chapter, a visual orderliness that effaces the traces of its own birth. Caillebotte’s oeuvre of self-portraits oscillates between two polarities: between the awkward, out-of-joint composition and pose of Autoportrait au chevalet (Figure 1.1), and the self-assured, ordered and dynamic seriality of Régates à Argenteuil (Plate 3). The only way to account for this gap, a dynamic oscillation between alienation and liberated performativity, is to understand, firstly, the structuring role of work in Caillebotte’s psyche and vision; secondly, his experience of painting and collecting as two analogous but distinct kinds of work; and thirdly, the surface of the canvas as the locus of the coming together of multiple strands of work. My ambition in looking closely at Caillebotte’s self-portraits has been to complicate the topoi of alienation and fracture that dominate critical readings of Caillebotte in relation to contemporaneous processes of aesthetic, social, material and economic change; I have argued that Caillebotte became stuck on the work of art, of painting and sitting, as both the symbol of, and salve for, his feelings of displacement. I now wish to turn to collecting, investigating in detail how it functioned within the sphere of Caillebotte’s labours. Régates à Argenteuil is successfully totalized because it adopts the visual and symbolic forms of the collection (its will to totality, its processes of serialization and ordering, its strong surface orthogonality) to signify the liberating cultural and class performativity of yachting, rather than relying exclusively on the work of art, the limitations of which Caillebotte was acutely aware.

2

Collecting

He and his brother, M. Martial Caillebotte, living together, devoting for fifteen years all their mornings to their [stamp] albums. Drawing everything together – a large fortune, a sure taste, and a love of work – they made of their collection a true ­monument.1 Le Collectionneur de timbres-poste, 1894 Collecting was among Caillebotte’s central preoccupations; throughout his life, he insistently accumulated (either through creation or purchase) objects which he then organized and displayed. Although he moved between collecting paintings, stamps, yachts and orchids, Caillebotte almost never produced a painting without having a collection of some description in progress.2 As such, the practice of collecting, in conjunction with the objects and spaces of his collections, gave structure to Caillebotte’s quotidian life: his time, energy and sociability. Caillebotte’s collecting practice was a complexly defensive and productive process of ‘coming to terms’ with a place in the world. It allowed Caillebotte to elide those historically specific social and subjective antagonisms made particularly acute by his multivalent liminality and alienation. It was by collecting (and the concomitant and analogous visual practices through which he inscribed collecting onto his artistic production) that Caillebotte created for himself a microcosmic social reality in which he could safely invest his enjoyment. Interlocking with the previous chapter, here I will demonstrate the fundamental significance for Caillebotte of collecting as a distinctive yet ambiguous form of work. Susan Stewart’s concept of collecting as a false labour – as an activity with a structural relation to labour, possessing an economy of desire with a structural relation to the economy of exchange – is central to this analysis. Before this, I will uncover the origin of Caillebotte’s urge to collect in the traumatic aftermath of loss. The quick and traumatic succession of bereavements endured by Caillebotte, losing his father Martial (1874), younger brother René (1876) and mother Céleste (1878), made a deep and lasting impression. It was after the death of René that Caillebotte, aged only twenty-six and struck with the tragically prescient fear of his own premature mortality, drew up his first will.3 The death of his mother, after which Caillebotte and his brother Martial moved out of the family home on rue Miromesnil, likewise registered as a traumatic rupture or absence. In 1879 Caillebotte painted a melancholic still life,

 Collecting 39 depicting the family tableware that had featured in the earlier Le Déjeuner (Figure 2.1). In the image, bountiful centrepiece arrangements of oranges and carefully arranged crystal tableware contrast jarringly with the silent and depopulated stillness of the scene. The arranged dinner table, a traditional index of prandial familial sociability, is subverted by the absence of intersubjective engagement in Le Déjeuner and, in the later Nature morte, by the absence of that absence; the deaths of Céleste and René have demonstrably impoverished an, admittedly dysfunctional, family unit that Caillebotte had taken pains to work himself into. Upon leaving the family home, Gustave and Martial moved into a shared apartment on the boulevard Haussmann, located behind the Opéra. It is in this fraternal environment that Caillebotte’s interest in stamps is generally believed to have begun.4 The two brothers enjoyed a remarkably close relationship and seem to have exchanged interests in order to pursue them together: through Gustave, Martial became interested in boating; through Martial, Gustave became interested in philately. Together, the two brothers immersed themselves in collecting and studying international stamps until Martial’s marriage on 24 May 1887 marked an end to their cohabitation.5 The collection was sold to Thomas Keay Tapling, an important British philatelist, friend and collaborator of the Caillebottes’, in 1887 for an enormous sum reported as 400,000 francs and £5,000.6 The Caillebotte collection, recoverable thanks to the profound influence it had on the Tapling Collection into which it was amalgamated after its sale, was not only an

Figure 2.1  Gustave Caillebotte, Le Déjeuner, 1876. 52 × 75 cm, oil on canvas. Private Collection, France.

40

Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

exhaustive catalogue of the varieties of postage stamps issued by certain authorities or within certain geographies (Caillebotte’s interest in the stamps of New South Wales and Mexico is documented) but (in line with the norms of French philately) an exhaustive catalogue of all the extant minutely variegated varieties of each of these designs. When displayed, specimens were grouped into series according to a nested hierarchy of attributes (including nation of issue, date of emission, face value and so on) and arranged into a neat orthogonal grid. Particularities introduced by the caprice of the fabrication process, such as differences of shade (Plate 4) or of the relative positions of iconographic elements (Figure 2.2), were illustrated iteratively. The core elements of the appearance of the stamp album are thus its orthogonal flatness, its iconographic repetition, its serially iterative ordering and its oscillation between minute detail and overall effect. In Part 2 this philatelic visuality and the concrete impact it had upon Caillebotte’s visual economy will be examined in detail; for now I wish to focus on collecting in the context of Caillebotte’s psychic economy, work which will form the ground for understanding most fully Caillebotte’s philatelic way of thinking and seeing. The relationship between Gustave and his brother Martial has recently become the focus of considerable study: Martial’s photographs, which exhibit important similarities in form and motif with Caillebotte’s art, have been investigated in terms of the visual influence they may have provided for Gustave’s idiosyncratic artistic vision and production of space.7 However, the significant chronological overlap between

Figure 2.2  Tapling Collection, France Sheet 36. Stamp album sheet. British Library, Philatelic Collections. By permission of the British Library.

 Collecting 41 Gustave’s closest involvement with Impressionism, his most productive years in terms of painting and his joint interest in stamp collecting, which was by no means a secondary pursuit, has been rather neglected. Gustave and Martial’s contribution to the field of philately is almost as crucial (and, until the 1970s, certainly better remembered) as Gustave’s contribution to modern painting. Their collection was perhaps the most important of its time (‘an unparalleled achievement’ as The Philatelic Record described it in 1890); they pioneered the study of post marks; published an extensive study of Mexican stamps which was translated into English in 1885; contributed greatly to the study of Australian stamps; and were posthumously honoured in 1921 as ‘Fathers of Philately’ in the Roll of Distinguished Philatelists of the Philatelic Congress of Great Britain.8 In addition to their association with the Société française de timbrologie, Gustave and Martial built a strong relationship with British philately: either Gustave or Martial attended the April 1883 meeting of the Philatelic Society, London, and both attended the Society’s annual dinner held at the Masonic Temple, Holborn Restaurant on 11 December 1884.9 Rather than accept at face value the happy scholarly dyad evoked by the philatelic press (for whom Gustave and Martial ‘[worked] heart and soul together’), I wish instead to propose that a possible route through which Caillebotte was first introduced to the symbolic and aesthetic power of stamps, which has yet to be postulated, was in the flurry of official legal documents Caillebotte had to sign and stamp following the deaths of his parents.10 These long documents, currently housed at the Archives nationales in Paris, required Caillebotte’s careful and extended attention, each requiring multiple signatures.11 In order to signal that the requisite duties and taxes had been paid, the documents were stamped or were affixed of a timbre de dimension12 (Figure 2.3). In the emotionally charged aftermath of these deaths, Caillebotte was thus subjected to the bureaucratic ordeal of registering his loss with the French state and was consequently required to purchase stamps to pay for the privilege. Slavoj Žižek’s account of bureaucratic symbolic efficiency concerns the way in which the bureaucratic institutions of the state must first register facts before they can be experienced as true by the subjects of ideology.13 Elements of one’s symbolic identity are, in this view, dependent upon being recognized and accepted as such by symbolic authority speaking through state bureaucracy if they are to be experienced as true by the subject of ideology.14 For Žižek, ‘the mystique of bureaucracy holds the power to shape both social reality itself and the functioning fantasies within in.’15 Even before his brother had the chance to convert him to the virtues of philately, Caillebotte was thus made painfully aware of the power of the stamp to function as a hinge between himself and the state, betokening the symbolic and phantasmic regulation of his symbolicsubjective identity. It was only after the documents had been stamped that they took legal effect: a performative stating of the fact of his parents’ and brother’s deaths that, in complementing the ritualistic, repetitive and communal signing of documents, made it operative as a symbolic fact.16 Although Caillebotte left no direct evidence that his interest in stamps began in the bureaucratic crucible of the notary office, it seems reasonable to suppose that at least part of the attraction of stamp collecting lay

42

Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

Figure 2.3  50 centimes et 2/10 en sus, Timbre de dimension, Revenue Stamp, 1872. 24 × 34 cm. Affixed to AN, 1878, MC/ET/XXV/317. Photo: © Samuel Raybone. in its sating of the compulsion to repeat the trauma of bereavement in such a way as to master and control it. Jacques Lacan thinks about trauma in terms of an anxiety-provoking encounter with ‘the ultimate real of the essential object which isn’t an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence’.17 As Žižek identifies, however, Lacan inherited from Sigmund Freud a notion of this trauma’s retroactive character, that it emerges most completely not at the time of the traumatic encounter, but only belatedly, after the subject has repeated the event over and over in their attempts to make sense of it.18 Thus, it is the compulsion to repeat in trauma that we are dealing with here: stamp collecting functioning for Caillebotte as a repetitive enactment of this traumatic encounter with the real of non-existence, the return of a signifier of the performative registration of this trauma with the state’s bureaucracy. The compulsion to repeat was first posited by Freud in relation to the death drive; in the 1950s Lacan came to redefine the compulsion to repeat in terms of an insistence of the signifying chain or of the letter.19 In this Lacanian view, then, despite the effort of the subject to repress them, certain signifiers insist on returning in the life of the subject.20 What is stamp collecting if not the repetitious and insistent return of signifiers?

 Collecting 43 That Caillebotte collected stamps alongside a sibling can similarly be understood in relation to trauma. Juliet Mitchell, in her important 2003 study of Siblings, has argued that the psychoanalytical over-valuation of vertical parent–child relations has problematically obscured the central role played by lateral sibling and peer relationships in subject formation.21 Mitchell argues that the existence or expectation of a sibling is experienced by the child as a trauma of self-duplication and self-annihilation: a profound loss of uniqueness.22 Mitchell deploys this notion of traumatic sibling displacement to reconfigure a number of psychoanalytical notions. Taking on the idea that representation depends on absence, Mitchell argues that it is not the presence/ absence of the phallus that is of significance but the presence/absence of the self.23 Mitchell articulates a ‘law of the Mother’ contra Lacan’s ‘law of the Father’, wherein the mother introduces a seriality of horizontal relations which functions to differentiate between the siblings, and articulates a prohibition on sibling reproduction that eventually induces the child to the realm of symbolic and social relations.24 Mitchell further distinguishes between sexual and gender difference, ascribing the former to vertical reproductive relations and the latter to polymorphous and lateral sexuality.25 It is the connection that Mitchell draws between trauma, seriality and siblings that, for my purposes, is crucial. The birth of a sibling is experienced by the subject as a traumatic surplus which stimulates interpenetrating feelings of murderousness and love: narcissistic love for the baby as an extension of the subject’s self and hate for the other that is the harbinger of one’s replacement and the death of the subject’s self. Both of these feelings are prohibited by the ‘law of the Mother’ and are thus necessarily transformed or displaced into different forms, inducing the subject into the social world of fraternal contractual relations. What animates the movement between love and hate, between sex and violence, in sibling relationships is the complex way in which the sibling is othered as not-me-but-like-me. In this context, the Mother’s differentiation of the siblings introduces a seriality which further prepares them for the ‘diverse and manifold splittings that characterize the social world: friend/enemy, young/old, white/black, child/baby, boy/girl … superior/inferior’.26 In my reading, the Mother emerges as a collector of siblings in so far as she exists to order them into a series: the self and the new (or previous, or expected: ‘unconscious processes do not know chronological time’) siblings are the terms in which this seriality is elucidated.27 Sibling trauma is the trauma of the birth of a collection, the induction of the supposedly unique self as just one term in a series of like terms. As Mitchell reminds us, the introduction of a sibling is ‘experienced as a death of the subject’s self … a trauma that can be revived every time a significant other person dies’.28 With Mitchell’s insights in mind, we may further posit, therefore, that the successive deaths of Caillebotte’s father, mother and younger brother triggered a return of the trauma of subjective death involved in sibling displacement, the serial dimension of which I have given more emphasis than does Mitchell. The compulsion to repeat and the compulsion to collect are thus one and the same: the compulsion to repeat traumatic sibling seriality. With Caillebotte, this was expressed in heightened form, with his sibling as his co-collector. Caillebotte’s life-long fixation on collecting took

44

Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

different forms, but may have been animated by infantile and adult traumas, and the fundamental significance of seriality in his experience of these traumas. As Carol E. Harrison has shown, collecting was embedded within historical discourses on class and gender. Her account of the salience of emulation for bourgeois sociability in the Third Republic locates late nineteenth-century collecting practices within the wider spread of learned societies across bourgeois society. She argues that through the ‘rituals of learned society sociability, bourgeois Frenchmen established and performed class and gender identities’.29 These societies, which studiously avoided politics, exhibited a tendency towards the kinds of accumulation and display of objects that closely correlates to the definition of collecting established by the anthropologist Krzysztof Pomian, for whom collecting is a highly specific ‘anthropological event’ by which the collector constructs socially validated meanings by assembling formerly useful things.30 Learned societies, and their associated museums, couched their acquisitiveness in scientific terms and distinguished it from the feminine connotations of shopping. Rather, they attempted to prove natural laws through a careful taxonomic categorization and organization of the most banal and economically worthless fragments of the material world. Harrison argues that the tendency for these societies to avoid collecting art, which carried with it pre-existing standards and values, indicates how bourgeois collectors sought to produce collections that would confer status upon themselves: non-art objects were altogether more malleable in this regard.31 Collecting, in this respect, was part and parcel of classed performativity: just as work was conceptualized in terms of physical effort to reshape the material world, collecting utilized mental effort in bringing the power of wealth to bear upon the organization of objects and meaning. It was in their shared power to remake the world and everyone in it that work (as constituted by Third Republican ideology) and collecting became conjoined and entwined (but not synonymous or isomorphic) in the late nineteenth century. The ambiguous position of collecting with regards to the process and spaces of work, its tenuous and ultimately undecidable relation to capitalism’s imperatives to produce, consume and exchange, only served to solidify their inseparability. If the ideological discourse on work was the means by which the Third Republic aimed to foster a fantasy of collective harmony, a defensive reaction to intrinsic socio-subjective antagonism, it was thus as a historically specific manifestation of ideology’s structural insistence towards producing society as a closed totality that collecting played its part. The fundamental homology between how collecting and ideology produce (the experience of) socio-subjective coherency by organizing and structuring the field of signifiers was also matched in the historically specific Third Republican discourse on work’s ontological and epistemological power to make the nation anew: collecting, like painting, can be, as I will argue, a habitual actualization of an ideology of labour. I wish to think about collecting as the purposeful accumulation of objects, which are organized into some kind of series, removed from the ordinary economic circuit of exchange and use (even if only temporarily), given special attention, placed on display and imputed with a certain symbolic or psychological meaning-producing quality. Rather than the rational-actor models favoured by anthropological theories of

 Collecting 45 collecting, I instead wish to emphasize collecting as a process active within and upon intense and unruly desire.32 In the post-Freud era, the tendency has been to pathologize collecting, to view it as symptomatic of anal character and stunted psychosexual development, that is, to identify it as a symptom in need of the analyst’s clinical hermeneutics. This symptomatic perspective resonated with the pre-existing popular cultural conception of the collector as a marginal or pathological figure; Flaubert and Balzac perhaps represent the most famous examples of the salience of this motif of the manic collector in literature.33 In their 2001 collection of essays on Collecting Queerly, Adrien Rifkin and Michael Camille critique this ‘unproductive pathological model’, proposing instead an understanding of collecting as performance and expressing the need to, in the words of Camille, ‘liberate the collector from the prison house of his or her possessions by rigorously historicizing their desire’.34 Rifkin and Camille’s emphasis is on the performative dimension of collecting, moving away from reductive models which pathologize collecting, treating it (exclusively) as symptomatic of a mental defect, blockage or anxiety with a straightforward equivalence in childhood; their insights are invaluable for my attempt to conceptualize those connections that exist between collecting and fundamental or normative, social, ideological or psychological structures, connections which are obscured by thinking of collecting in terms of pathology or as an aberration (if we exclusively conceptualize collecting as a deviation from a supposed norm, any role it might play in the constitution and enforcement of that norm becomes unthinkable). My ideological reading of collecting attempts to avoid the trap of pathologization while retaining the hermeneutic power of a symptomatic reading, building on Rifkin and Camille’s call for historicism in conjunction with a specifically Žižekian understanding of the symptom.35 It is in his theoretical and methodological privileging of the symptom that Žižek’s politicization of psychoanalysis emerges most forcefully. In The Sublime Object of Ideology Žižek builds on Lacan’s identification of Marx as the originator of the notion of the symptom; for Marx, the proletariat was the symptom of capitalism, the extrinsic consequence of internal disorder.36 Lacan proves useful for Žižek in shifting the Marxian symptom (qua manifestation of a specific blockage, disorder or exclusion that will disappear once resolution is achieved) into a universal category: the symptom is no longer a break in the usual functioning of the system but rather fundamental to its very constitution, the embodiment of its universality and a condition of subjective existence. Lacan first elucidated the symptom as emerging from the unconscious and thus operative in the symbolic order as a signifier, index, metaphor or indeed signification itself; the symptom is thus aligned with meaning and truth, and with the clinical-hermeneutic practice of its uncovering.37 The structure of the symptom is ‘the symbolic function stamped on the flesh’.38 However, Lacan’s late shift in focus away from the symbolic and towards the real (towards jouissance and the objet petit a) manifested in a transformation in his thinking on the symptom. Now using the term ‘sînthome’, Lacan came to outline a way of symptomatic thinking focused on the real of jouissance: no longer is it a matter of decoding the ciphered messages of unconscious truth, but rather recognizing the sînthome as something beyond the bounds of signification, of meaning or of analysis.

46

Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

The sînthome is a trace or stain of the real of a subject’s modality of enjoyment.39 It is this late Lacanian line of thinking that Žižek finds most fertile: aligning the symptom/ sînthome with the real, rather than the symbolic, shifted focus on that which animated symbolic determination while remaining outside it. Žižek’s thinking about the Lacanian real is indebted to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s conception of antagonism as the inevitable failure of an ideological field to constitute itself discursively, the production of the left-over or excluded part that is necessary for any universality to constitute itself as such.40 Žižek is thus interested in how a symbolic universe is actually structured by what it excludes.41 Žižek identifies the symptom as a pathological knot of jouissance that resists all attempts to make it mean while being the positive condition of meaning in the first place.42 Our symptoms are what sustain us as subjects of ideology: it is only possible to Enjoy your Symptom!43 Thus, in thinking about Caillebotte’s collecting practice as a symptom in this precise sense, what I am aiming towards is an understanding of Caillebotte’s response to his ideological context as a dialectical movement between dynamics of fracture and totalization, rather than any sort of posthumous diagnosis. Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay ‘Unpacking My Library. A Talk about Book Collecting’ emphasizes how the collector constitutes his self-identity and self-experience through the regulating mechanism of his collection.44 The objects he collects crystallize memory and telescope the past, present and future through a utopian dialectic of nostalgia and anticipation. Possession, for Benjamin, is an intimate kind of rebirth, and collecting is the organized renewal of the material world. In his 1968 book – System of Objects – Jean Baudrillard likewise highlights how collecting aids the subject as he strives to constitute a private, closed totality in which he has a place.45 Both Benjamin and Baudrillard highlight how the structuring and regulation of time is central to this function. Unlike Benjamin, Baudrillard develops this view in explicitly psychoanalytical terms, thinking of collecting as an unconscious discourse, in terms of sexual desire as a narcissistic anal-regression from the anxiety of (necessarily) partial human relationships. The object of collection is able to fulfil this regressive role on account of its sexlessness. The objects in a collection are symbolically castrated, so that they can function as a salve for their owner’s own castration anxiety. These mute, sexless, reflective objects are sharply delineated from the subject, despite the fact that Baudrillard identifies the collector himself as the last in the set of items in his collection, which, crucially, means that ‘you can look at an object without it looking back at you’.46 Any reader of Lacan will surely recognize that here Baudrillard is approaching the concept of the gaze: that unsettling return of the look by the other which threatens to undo the subject’s desire through an eruption of the real. The act of collecting or possession somehow (Baudrillard is unclear on this) tames the object, and distances and shields the subject from the gaze of the other. However, Baudrillard’s account of collecting is not all plain sailing: it is the eminently Lacanian category of lack which animates a fundamental tension. The final object of a series is constituted as a lack, whose presence would signal the destruction of the subject-collector, since it would complete and close the collection. This lack is experienced as suffering, but it is the only thing standing in the way of complete

 Collecting 47 annihilation. Here again, Baudrillard approaches Lacan: the economy of desire that this logic implies is analogous to Lacan’s account of desire and, in particular, the objet petit a (the imaginary, and therefore unobtainable, object-cause of the subject’s desire). It is the final object in the series that animates the subject-collector’s desire – the desire for perfection – and provides the coordinates and direction for its functioning. Yet, this desire necessarily circles round its object without ever truly approaching it: each object purchased by the collector in the course of his collecting-drive – in order to expand and potentially complete the collection – is necessarily experienced as a certain, potentially agonizing, ‘this-is-not-it’. The objet petit a thus eludes him, his desire slips in the direction of a new object which is again fetishistically invested with significance and so on ad infinitum. The collection is never complete so long as the subject’s desire and drives are never eradicated. This connection between collecting and the regulation of enjoyment sheds further light onto the psychic imperatives of Caillebotte’s collecting, particularly his stamp collecting, in relation to the repetitive or compulsive character of the discipline. In the 1960s, Lacan came to reconfigure his thinking about repetition away from a strict notion of the ‘insistence of the letter’ towards a return of jouissance, that excess of enjoyment that slips all bounds and seeks death.47 Through Baudrillard and Lacan we have come to an understanding of collecting as, at least in part, a regulatory matrix of the subject’s enjoyment. We can think about collecting as the field within which the pleasure principle and the death drive interface, with the former ‘lead[ing] the subject from signifier to signifier’ – from stamp to stamp, and (elsewhere) yacht to yacht, orchid to orchid – in order to generate a web of signification such that the subject is shielded from that which is beyond the pleasure principle, the death drive.48 It is thus one manifestation of a compulsion to repetition that oscillates between the symbolic prohibitions of the pleasure principle and the explosive real of jouissance. However, Baudrillard takes pains to point out that collecting (as distinct from mere accumulation) must always have ‘a door open onto culture’, a connection with the world concomitant with its domestic, subjective dimension.49 Baudrillard does not elucidate how this connection might function, how collecting can be conceived as a social practice, either in a specific historical moment or more generally. It is at this point that Žižek’s account of ideology, conceptualized as a set of symbolic representations constitutive of social subjectivity, held together by the unacknowledged regulation of enjoyment through psychic fantasy, can be useful. Collecting can be understood as a microcosmic enactment of ideological fantasy: the constitution, organization and regulation of a series of objects, which function as signifiers, into a totality in which the collecting subject can safely invest and structure his enjoyment. Baudrillard’s conception of the collection as a safe-haven from the extrinsic impossibility of intersubjectivity can be thought in Žižekian terms as a retreat from social and subjective antagonism, from class struggle and lack. In this shift from Baudrillard to Žižek, the anxiety-provoking lack which haunts the subject and animates his collecting practice is no longer of internal origin (castration anxiety), but has morphed to include an external threat (the lack in the big Other and the concomitant antagonism inherent in the social order). This enactment is also a naturalization: the subject finding his place in, and accommodating

48

Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

himself to, his ideologically produced social reality, accepting its tacit exclusions and elisions, and the parameters through which his enjoyment, indeed his very subjectivity, is constituted.50 In her seminal 1984 book On Longing, Susan Stewart sees narrative ‘as a structure of desire, a structure that both invents and distances its object and thereby inscribes again and again the gap between signifier and signified that is the place of generation for the symbolic’.51 Along with the souvenir, she understands the collection as a ‘[device] for the objectification of desire’ and as ‘the space of nexus for all narratives’.52 Stewart puts forward a Marxist-Lacanian reading of the collection as an economy of both desire and exchange, mapping the frameworks of the capitalist political economy onto the fetishistic valuation of objects, not merely in terms of commodification (in the Marxian sense) but as one which, through the over-valuation of organizational principles, the play of seriality and infinity, and imposition of control and containment, has as its ultimate term the self and identity of the collector.53 The work of collecting, or as Stewart sees it, ‘the (false) labor of the collector’, is precisely in navigating this nexus of control, containment and (subjective) constitution, which constantly oscillates between the micro and the macro, between self-sufficient closure and the infinite play of signification threatened by the world at large (recall my previous identification of Caillebotte’s collecting practice as oscillating between the pleasure principle and the death drive).54 And it is in attempting to understand the work of the collector in this full dimension that Žižek is at his most useful. What animates this oscillation between the subject and ideology, and opens another front to the vicissitudes of historical specificity and contingency, is the labour of the collector. What Stewart’s Marxist-inflected theory of collecting most clearly articulates is the fundamental ambiguity of collecting vis-à-vis the spaces and processes of work. The collector is rarely a professional, typically pursuing his or her hobby during time off the job, using the income to fund their acquisitions. As such, the collector makes a libidinal investment: the collector enjoys collecting, be it in the thrill of the hunt, the exhilaration of the rare find or in the orderly calm of a perfectly aligned vitrine or album. However, in many cases, this libidinal investment is channelled through structures that, superficially at least, resemble work; collecting is far removed from any sense of ‘free play’. Stewart’s notion of the false labour of the collector emphasizes the notion of the work of the collector as distinct from the usual functioning of commodities under capitalism: the surplus value produced by the object of the collection, simultaneously and paradoxically commodified and castrated, is only ever a surplus-jouissance, realized only for the profit of its self-perpetuation. It is only in consuming commodities that the collector can ‘produce’ anything: as Stewart points out, although the collection is a sub-field within and mirroring the larger economy of surplus value, it is self-contained and self-sufficient with regard to its own meanings.55 An unlikely resonance of Stewart’s theoretical examination of the work of the collector appears in L. N. Williams’s drily instructional Fundamentals of Philately, first published as a serial within The American Philatelist in the 1950s. In attempting to demystify the ‘aims of collecting’, Williams writes that ‘most people … expect their collecting activities to provide them with pleasure in the form of relaxation and change

 Collecting 49 from everyday work, even if the attraction consists merely in exchanging one form of study for another’.56 ‘Further’, he continues, ‘many people regard their collections as, at the same time, providing a form of investment [both for their money, and for their enjoyment]’.57 For Williams then, the pleasure of collecting lies in its delimited yet ambiguous relation to work, distinct yet isomorphic with regards to the individual’s experience of his or her activity. If stamp collecting is the process by which money is simultaneously transformed into both commodities and pleasure, it necessarily forges a second-order relation between the stamp as a commodity and the pleasure of the collector. Without perhaps intending to, Williams reveals the deep and historic intertwining of stamp collecting with the operation of commodity fetishism within capitalist ideology, the ambiguous and parallax relation between collecting and work vis-à-vis the exchange of commodities and the production of pleasure, and consequently, the hermeneutic value of an explicitly Marxist-Lacanian analytical framework. Insofar as the collector works to constitute his or her own subjectivity, this work occurs in a (physical and discursive) space distorted by the parallax gap which separates it from ‘ordinary’ labour. As such, historically specific and contingent conceptions of work and leisure become crucial in shaping the ways in which subjects of ideology conceive of themselves, and their relationship to their ideology. In this respect, collecting is an ideological event: a microcosmic re-enactment of the phantasmic support of capitalist ideology in which production turns to consumption, the exchange economy into the economy of desire. By organizing and displaying the material fragments of their exterior world, collectors create and articulate a subjective identity, while simultaneously structuring their jouissance. The classification of collecting as work or leisure is undecidable and contingent. As such, the arena in which subjects constitute a sense of themselves and the world around them, the (non-)workspace of the collection, depends upon an exterior conception of precisely what work is. Caillebotte’s collecting was thus structurally connected to conceptions of labour in the context of the Third Republic’s economic and social forms, and it functioned in ways that we can discern as mirroring and distorting their patterns of labour, production, exchange, value, discipline and enjoyment. I have attempted to understand collecting in relation to labour, as a process by which the collector works at becoming himself; the false labour of the collector is in producing a subjectively soothing totality out of the maelstrom of commodities and signifiers that constitute society under capitalism. However, for Caillebotte, in addition to the structural class antagonism of his historical moment, the compulsion to repeat borne out of the trauma of bereavement and its related registration with the state acted as an important driving force for his collecting work. Gustave and Martial’s collection of stamps thus implicated both the law of the Father (in Lacan’s sense as being the regulator of desire; the vertical relation to the ideological Other routed through its bureaucratic apparatus and signified by the postage stamp) and the law of the Mother (in Mitchell’s sense as being the regulator of sibling and peer sociality – the practice of collecting as a framework for lateral fraternal sociability, in which the traumas of birth and death are endlessly repeated).

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Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

It was in precisely the same traumatic period during which Caillebotte began collecting postage stamps that he also began to accumulate the paintings of his Impressionist comrades; Monet’s 1875 Un coin d’appartement was among his earliest purchases.58 Caillebotte’s sustained patronage of his peers appears to have had a complex array of motivations: to cement social bonds, to lend material support to Impressionism’s aesthetic mission and to offset his painterly distance from the normative Impressionist style by facilitating a proximity through ownership.59 Caillebotte often supplemented his direct monetary support of his colleagues by purchasing their paintings at a rate above market value.60 That he would often leave this supplemental payment unspoken, lest it be rejected, indicates his awareness of the potential volatility of the mixture of friendship, charity and commodity exchange.61 From this perspective then, Caillebotte’s amassing of Impressionist masterpieces seems to be more an act of patronage and material support than collecting sensu stricto. Marie Berhaut views Caillebotte’s collecting in this light, as a charitable act above all, a generous offering of assistance to his friends struggling to sell on the open market.62 However, as even Berhaut admits, there was a certain element of aesthetic selectivity, evidenced by Caillebotte’s deliberate exclusion of Symbolist and Post-Impressionist tendencies, as well as avoiding works by his close friends Giuseppe de Nittis or Jean Béraud on grounds we can only suppose to have been aesthetic.63 Moreover, as we have seen with Autoportrait au chevalet (Figure 1.1), the paintings possessed by Caillebotte became invested with the power to signify their owner, the site of a kind of displaced subjective identity, in a way absolutely typical of collections. Caillebotte’s will, drawn up on 3 November 1876 (and later amended in 1883 and 1889), made the highly presumptuous provision for his collection of Impressionist works to be left to the state, on the proviso that they were to hang in the Musée du Luxembourg.64 If Caillebotte’s collection of Impressionist paintings originated in this moment of acute anxiety about the inevitable reality of mortality, then, as his will indicates, Caillebotte himself likewise explicitly conceptualized it, right from its beginning, in terms of his own legacy and death. Caillebotte was thus able to imagine himself as an agent of the ideological Other, collecting on its behalf. In this fantasy, Caillebotte erased himself in the real in order to live on in the symbolic: the purpose of his collection of Impressionist paintings was to facilitate his disavowal of death and concomitant fantasy of immortality. Once completed, the Caillebotte Bequest (le legs Caillebotte) would survive its owner and enter in toto the sphere of the state, ensuring that Caillebotte forever had a place within the symbolic coordinates of his nation and society. Where the stamp collection was oriented towards the present, his art collection was oriented towards the future, towards the afterlife. After Caillebotte’s death in 1894, in accordance with his wishes, though delayed by bureaucratic wrangling and a florid and fevered press controversy, in 1895 the state accepted into its ownership a segment of Caillebotte’s collection of Impressionist paintings, housing them in a specially constructed wing at the Musée du Luxembourg.65 What became known as the Caillebotte Affair formed the core of Caillebotte’s early legacy, overshadowing all else (even his own artistic practice), testifying to the success of his gambit.66

 Collecting 51 Caillebotte was only able to experience the integration of unspeakable grief into his symbolic universe once it had been registered by the state bureaucracy (a registration betokened by stamps, and compulsively re-enacted by their collection). Thus, where stamp collecting was the result of a compulsion to repeat the passage of death in the real to death in the symbolic, Caillebotte’s collection of paintings came to be about disavowing his own real death by preparing for symbolic immortality. The mystique of the bureaucracy was such that Caillebotte was able to imagine it affording him the means to submit a body of work to survive him. This body was to be the legs Caillebotte, a matrix of signification for which ‘Caillebotte’ (as the name suggests) was its point de capiton (i.e. the attachment point between signifier and signified, the node around which meaning coheres). What is more curious about this psychic investment in the paintings of others is precisely this extrinsic nature; Caillebotte explicitly excluded his own paintings from his bequest, indicating a conceptual boundary that existed for him between the two. This dynamic of Caillebotte’s painting and collecting being distinct yet connected, with Caillebotte’s subjectivity oscillating across their points of contact, is central to my reading of his art. What was in Caillebotte’s collection more than itself, more than the sum of its parts (and not included in them), was this symbolic residue of Caillebotte’s immortal fantasy, which was the surplus-signification of Caillebotte himself. Susan Stewart has noted the complex ahistoricism of collecting. ‘In the collection, time is not something to be restored to an origin; rather, all time is made simultaneous or synchronous within the collection’s world’, which is to say, the collection is fundamentally decontextualized from the flow of history (‘the collection replaces history with classification’), and it constitutes its own meanings without the need for external points of reference.67 Consequently, ‘the past lends authenticity to the collection’, as opposed to the collection bearing witness to the past.68 In this way the objects of the collection are shorn of binding context and rendered malleable. We have seen this kind of malleability at work in Caillebotte’s Autoportrait au chevalet (Figure 1.1), in which the mere presence of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Bal du moulin de la Galette as an object of Caillebotte’s possession, pictured hanging on the rear wall, is mobilized to cover over the fissures and fractures in Caillebotte’s self-identification as a painter while at once impinging upon the subjectivity it indexes. The selective appearance of paintings in the interiors set in his homes on the rue de Miromesnil and boulevard Haussmann – absent, for example, in Intérieur, femme lisant (Figure 1.4), and his portraits of Jules Richemont, Richard Gallo and Jules Dubois, present in Autoportrait au chevalet (Figure 1.1), La Partie de bésigue (Plate 6) and his Portrait de jeune femme (Madame Hagen) (Figure 2.4) – should be understood as a consequence of the screening, defensive function of the collection made possible by the collection’s ahistoricism.69 It was in those scenes which aroused anxiety or difficulty that Caillebotte tended to include a (fragment of) painting within the painting to sublimate his anxiety and reassure himself of his mastery. Such tension is clear in the portrait of the woman who was to become his romantic and sexual partner, Charlotte Berthier (one and the same person as Madame Hagen, Figure 2.4). Sat in the professional setting of the studio we see being prepared in Les raboteurs de parquet,

52

Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

Figure 2.4  Gustave Caillebotte, Portrait de jeune femme (Madame Hagen), 1877. 81 × 65 cm, oil on canvas. Private Collection © Comité Caillebotte, Paris. Charlotte is visibly uncomfortable, her stiffened body twisting in the chair (rather than relaxing into it), impassively looking into space, refusing to make eye contact. Although indoors, she is not at home enough to remove her hat, a fact which compounds our sense of her discomfort. As Michael Marrinan observes, the ‘portrait is cropped by the lower edge of the frame; she is both close at hand and held to a distance’, that is, her relation to Caillebotte as he paints her is decidedly ambiguous.70 Marrinan sees this as a manifestation of the conflict between, on the one hand, Caillebotte’s sexual desire for Charlotte and, on the other hand, the fact that her low social standing made the formalization of any relationship all but impossible.71 Caillebotte was certainly attuned to the vicissitudes of the Third Republic’s class structure and the problematic consequences of its disparities for his individualized interactions with members of the working class.72 If Charlotte visits Caillebotte’s studio in order to pose for him, and her relation to Caillebotte is that of model to artist (instead of or as well as object of sexual desire), moreover, then we might also be witnessing Caillebotte’s insecurity regarding his painterly practice and identity as a painter, the very same anxieties that would come to be expressed in Autoportrait au chevalet. Into this maelstrom of desire and anxiety, then, Caillebotte inserts a framed painting that, given the studio setting, date of the painting and Caillebotte’s habit of hanging his collection pieces in his studio, we can assume to have come from his collection of paintings (based on the scale, the overall blue-grey tonality and the patch of red in the bottom-right corner, it could well be Degas’s Femme sortant du bain or Les choristes).73 Given that Caillebotte has not been concerned to ensure the identifiability of the painting (or pastel) within the painting discounts the possibility that its inclusion was intended to enrich the work’s symbolic meaning, to display and advertise his collection,

 Collecting 53 to fashion himself as a patron and accumulate the due social capital. Instead, the interjection of (a token of) the collection – which I have argued is best understood as a structure for the regulation of Caillebotte’s desire and a screen against social (class) antagonism and the trauma of bereavement – is an instinctive defensive manoeuvre, an unconscious turn towards the sphere in which his sexual desire, class anxiety and traumatic bereavement (Caillebotte could hardly have failed to be but acutely aware that the studio in which he faced Charlotte was constructed from funds allotted to him in his father’s will) were more manageable. The residual awkwardness of the painting indicates that Caillebotte was only partly successful. In La Partie de bésigue (Plate 6), Marrinan reads an irruption of a very different kind: he cites Eve Sedgwick’s theories of homosocial desire and homosexual panic to posit that the ‘extremely visible, sensually painted, curvilinear filigree of the wall sconce [… that] begs to be interpreted as a deeply repressed – even subconscious – sign of femininity that alludes schematically to a woman’s upper body’ represents Caillebotte’s attempt to safeguard the homosocial intimacy of this all-male party by placing it under a signifier of heterosexual desire as to ‘evacuat[e] the picture’s potential for homosexual panic’.74 In Jeune homme à sa fenêtre (Figure 6.2), Caillebotte had concentrated his pigment and attention on his brother René’s stiff, upright body and heavy, black suit. In La Partie de bésigue such bodies proliferate, arranged around the table in various poses, all apart from one firmly planted on their feet or in their seats. In Jeune homme à sa fenêtre, as Tamar Garb has identified, the effort expended by Caillebotte to visualize a phallic, bourgeois masculinity in the form of his brother’s stiff, upright and fully covered body effected a splintering of his subjectivity such that its repressed, feminine aspect re-emerged as a reflection framed in lace.75 In another painting featuring a brother – Martial is here distinguished by his brown, rather than black, suit – set in his home, it is therefore certainly plausible that Caillebotte’s unconscious response to the vicissitudes of a bourgeois masculinity in ‘crisis’ might manifest as an evacuation of any hint of femininity from male bodies – a repression which inevitably returns in another guise. However, in articulating the relationship between the (feminine) wall sconce and the (masculine) bezique table, Marrinan passes over the corner of a painting visible on the left. Its purpose is not immediately clear: the painting bears none of the awkwardness of Portrait de jeune femme (Madame Hagen) (Figure 2.4); the pyramidal structure of the figure group secures them in the interior space, and although there is the same lack of eye contact, the mood here is of studied concentration rather than awkward silence. Like collecting, the card game of bezique had a defined set of rules that determined the patterns of sociability of its (in this case two) participants. Within that structure, the iterative back-and-forth of dealing cards to oneself and one’s opponent, of playing one’s hand, and tallying the scores refined the infinite multiplicity of ludic and social interactions into an anticipatable, repeatable, chain of events. Bezique offered a structure for healthy competition and the cementing of social bonds; one can imagine a similar scene taking place, with Caillebotte sat across from his brother (in the place taken here by Maurice Brault), focusing their attention on postage stamps, albums, tweezers and magnifying glasses.

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Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

If the ‘curvilinear filigree of the wall sconce’ represents what, in the group, is absent, then the painting – if it functions, as does the possible Degas pastel in his portrait of Charlotte, as a conduit by which the soothing psychic structures of Caillebotte’s collection of paintings made themselves felt – represents a surplus of the group’s rule-based structure and intensely focused sociability. The painting’s background is therefore fragmented into, on the one hand, the repressed inverse of the game’s ordered, rational, masculine frame of mind in the sensuous, carefree abandon of the busty sconce and, on the other hand, the senseless, surplus over-layering of yet another collection. The presence and, indeed, narrative centrality, of Brault, Caillebotte’s sailing companion and fellow bachelor, surely called to his mind the world of yachting (a sport with its own social circle centred on the CVP, and with its own set of rules, in which Caillebotte, as we have seen, took an extraordinary interest) contains a further reference, more accessible to Caillebotte than the viewers of this painting, to the many labours that structured Caillebotte’s life. Thus, if we focus attention on some of La Partie de bésigue’s constituent components, we can make sense of a work that strains at (without breaching) the limits of what Caillebotte’s collecting could be made to do for his painting, both in terms of policing the potentially perilous and in keeping to its place once structure had successfully supplanted solicitude. Less than six years after painting La Partie de bésigue, Caillebotte would give up collecting both stamps and paintings for good. Caillebotte’s abrupt cessation of philatelic collecting and the financially unnecessary liquidation of his stamp collection in 1887 is something of an anomaly within his larger practice: with no other activity did he engage in such a sudden and irreversible distancing. The Philatelic Record accounted for this seemingly impulsive and rather dramatic repudiation of philately with the ‘well-known French proverb … Cherchez la femme’: Martial’s marriage signalled the end of his and Gustave’s fraternal closeness, and so with it their shared philatelic practice.76 However, there is no reason to presuppose that Gustave could not have continued without his brother, should he have chosen: he pursued horticulture, yachting and yacht design without Martial, and likewise never took up either of Martial’s other great passions, music or photography. Given the psychic investments Caillebotte had made in stamp collecting, this dramatic rejection of philately, and negation of all previous work he had undertaken in the field by selling off his collection, demands further consideration. Taking a Lacanian view, we can see this as a kind of ‘acting out’: a reaction to the comprehensive failure of stamp collecting to screen him from the inevitable return of the repressed, the real of mortality, triggered by the loss (albeit of a different register) of his brother.77 It was at this time too, in 1887, that Caillebotte stopped buying Impressionist paintings: Marie Berhaut attributed this to the fact that his Impressionist comrades no longer needed his material support.78 However, letters between Caillebotte and Monet indicate that Caillebotte did indeed continue to provide Monet with cash.79 This discrepancy only makes sense if, as I have been arguing, we move away from thinking about Caillebotte’s purchases in terms of charity, and instead investigate them as part of his wider psychic investment in the acquisition and organization of objects. My hypothesis of Caillebotte’s ‘acting out’ in 1887 is supported by his contemporaneous painting, which likewise responded to this triggering loss in terms

 Collecting 55 of a return to the original trauma. In 1887, Caillebotte painted two portraits of Jean Daurelle, the family butler (Figure 2.5), who had featured in Le Déjeuner (Figure 2.1). Just as he had in 1879 in painting Nature morte, a poignant mediation on death as loss, absence and lack, Caillebotte, experiencing the end of fraternal closeness and cohabitation as another kind of loss, could not keep himself from returning to Le Déjeuner, which had, it seems, retroactively become a signifier of loss, as if picking at an old wound. These cool and strangely disconnected portraits prefigure in many ways the Autoportrait Caillebotte was to produce in the following year (Figure 1.2). All three paintings, the two portraits of Jean Daurelle and Caillebotte’s Autoportrait (Figures 2.5 and 1.2), utilize tonally distinct, elongated and rough brushstrokes as signifiers of physical ageing. Moreover, they all position their subject before a blank blue-grey backdrop, isolating them from the spaces and objects through which subjectivity was typically made visually manifest in nineteenth-century portraiture. The two portraits of Daurelle depict him in the same attire (for the full-length portrait he has not changed, but merely added his overcoat and top hat), in the same space, and so were most likely painted during the same session or set of sessions. In the close-up portrait, Caillebotte elects to depict Daurelle’s slight amblyopia: one eye meets the look of the viewer, while the other wanders off the edge of the canvas, perhaps towards Caillebotte as he paints. This split gaze makes the viewer keenly aware of the split identified by Lacan between the eye and the gaze, the gap between seeing and being seen. Not only does Daurelle’s vacant impassivity frustrate the viewer in their attempts to reconstruct, or identify with, a depicted subjectivity, but this arresting and discomforting focus on Daurelle’s split gaze exemplifies the very division in the subject as such. Daurelle explicitly both sees us and is seen by us. In seeming to contradict Lacan’s maxim that ‘you never look at me from the place at which I see you’, that is to say, in making visible the gaze of the other typically located outside the subject’s field of vision, this portrait threatens to destabilize the viewing subject’s experience of her own subjectivity by noting its dependence upon the other.80 These portraits of Daurelle, especially Portrait de Jean Daurelle (Figure 2.5), reveal a moment in which Caillebotte was experiencing the resurfacing of traumatic loss as a kind of inter- and intrasubjective split or fracturing. Caillebotte’s focus on Daurelle’s split gaze at this heightened moment, the traumatic apex of the failure of the stamp collection to screen him from loss, would thus seem to confirm Baudrillard’s identification of the collection as a structure that screens the collecting subject from the disturbing Lacanian gaze. The complicated trajectory of Caillebotte’s yachting paintings, explored in the previous chapter – which spans the physicality and dynamism of his Yerres-era works; through the distanced, decorative and abstracting marine scenes of the Norman coast; the static, stilted, Seine-based efforts of the mid-1880s; and later the complex synthesis of Régates à Argenteuil – likewise registers 1887 as a traumatic rupture, not in terms of the eruption of the Lacanian split but as a return of the structuring principles by which the stamp album had kept it at bay. As we have seen, having turned his attention to the coast after 1882, Caillebotte’s paintings of, for example, Voiliers en mer or Marine, régates à Villers (Figure 1.5) tend

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Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

Figure 2.5  Gustave Caillebotte, Portrait de Jean Daurelle, 1887. 65 × 54 cm, oil on canvas. Private Collection © Comité Caillebotte, Paris. towards a decorative and looser visual abstraction. However, after 1887, Caillebotte increasingly started to recover the tighter and more artificial structuring principles that had defined many of his early works, renewing his interest in plunging perspectival contrivances, the play between surface and depth, and the structuring action of the orthogonal grid. Having first lost the working comradeliness of Impressionism in 1882, the loss in 1887 of Martial to marriage found Caillebotte bereft of the regulatory and supportive matrix of the stamp collection (in and of itself, and the sociability it implied). Although he immersed himself in the bourgeois dominated spheres of yachting and local politics, it was primarily painting that bore the burden previously entrusted to stamp collection, its form morphing along with its function. Where stamp collecting had offered psychic support and regulation, the framework within which Caillebotte could experience the shared fantasy of social harmony around which his ideological universe centred, it had facilitated in Caillebotte’s early 1880s paintings of Normandy an exploration of the looser Impressionistic style that Anthea Callen has so convincingly identified with the dialectic of fracture and cohesion.81 However, after 1887, when the merest hint of fracturing abstraction might prove too much, Caillebotte once again came to rely on the work of painting (depiction and depicted) as the means by which he could actualize the totalization offered by collecting generally, and stamp collecting specifically. On the surface of the canvas, the work of painting, collecting and yachting were fused to give Régates à Argenteuil (Plate 3) its distinctive form; the orthogonal and serialized visuality of the stamp album offered the means by which Caillebotte could visualize a closed, total, but nevertheless object- and employee-dependent,

 Collecting 57 subjectivity. In the narrative context of the painting, it is Joseph, not Caillebotte who physically works. Caillebotte gestures at the boat, an object that indexes the work he (in designing it) and others (in the manufacture) have already done. As Daniel Charles has noted, in the Régates à Argenteuil Caillebotte made use of the centuries-old tradition of the ‘ship portrait’, where the boat in question is depicted in three states: moored, going windward and going downwind.82 This formal device of repetition across the visual plane with minor variations recalls the iterative and repetitive visual morphology of the stamp album. Moreover, it creates a structure whereby Roastbeef signifies only as part of a series, a collection, connecting the singular and the universal. Where Caillebotte gestures at Roastbeef, therefore, he is indicating not only the work already completed but also the collection as the framework within which that work is made sensible. The potential for bodily strain, effort and excess (work as a physical function) is thus bounded by a visual framework which produces work as a symbolic process in which objects are neither created nor destroyed but merely arranged. Whereas in his earlier work Caillebotte had become fixated on visual contrivances, overly complex perspectival structures, academic process and facture for their own sake, in relation to the work of painting, in this late painting he instead combined them to produce a plausible narrative of success, a fantasy of wholeness, a web of signification with Caillebotte himself at its structuring locus (its point de capiton). Having left Paris and his stamps behind, having swapped an arena of class mixing for one of bourgeois hegemony, Caillebotte is thus able to visualize a subjectivity ostensibly untouched by the stain of socio-subjective antagonism, and yet nevertheless structured by that which it excludes: the work of art. Régates à Argenteuil thus represents a late resurgence of what I wish to think about as the philatelic mode of painting that Caillebotte had developed in the 1870s, in paintings such as Rue de Paris; temps de pluie (Plate 2), Le Pont de L’Europe (Figure 3.1) and Les Peintres en bâtiment (Figure 3.2), to which we now turn.

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Part 2

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3

Philately and photography

Is he really an ‘Impressionist’, this M. Caillebotte?1

Charles Bigot, 1877

Susan Stewart asserts that the defining characteristic of a collection is the means by which it is organized: ‘To ask which principles of organization are used in articulating the collection is to begin to discern what the collection is about.’2 The same is true of Caillebotte’s monumental Parisian street scenes: at their core they are about the organization of pictorial space and of bodies and their relations within that space. The principles of this organization index Caillebotte’s response to the real and perceived processes of change occurring in the concrete socio-economic relations and forms of the bourgeois Third Republic as they were signified by its built environment. The idea that paintings such as Rue de Paris; temps de pluie (Plate 2), Le Pont de L’Europe (Figure 3.1) and Les Peintres en bâtiment (Figure 3.2) produce meaning in direct relation to contemporaneous shifts in the social, symbolic and visual-aesthetic composition and arrangement of French society under the Third Republic is well established. The conceptual leap that typically follows is the notion that, in order to find a visual paradigm in which it would be possible to figure these new social relations, the changed and changing facts of modern life, Caillebotte turned to photography, understood as a specifically modern technical and visual-cultural phenomenon.3 Indeed, reading Caillebotte’s paintings through the topos of the photographic has emerged as a hermeneutic lingua franca in scholarship on the artist.4 Caillebotte’s plunging views of Paris, seemingly illogical perspectival contrivances, dynamic interplay between flatness and depth and distortions of space and scale are all taken as evidence for an engagement with photographic technologies and the contemporaneously emerging photographic ‘mode of perception’.5 Yet, Jonathan Crary’s seminal Techniques of the Observer underlines the need to ground any invocation of a mode of perception in the historical discourses that have constituted vision as such (discourses which in turn interface with the production of social power and knowledge about the body).6 Crary argues that the emergence of a modern form of vision, typically attributed to the reality effect of the photographic image coupled with increasing abstraction in the realm of painting, was actually part of a much longer process (of which photography and Impressionism were symptomatic),

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wherein the observer itself was ‘modernized’, uprooted from the objective and static ground of visual truth current until the end of the eighteenth century.7 As such, photography and photographic modes of perception emerged from this modernizing thrust, and were implicated in the social forms it engendered: ‘Photography and money became homologous forms of social power in the nineteenth century,’ argues Crary. ‘They are equally totalizing systems for binding and unifying all subjects within a single global network of valuation and desire. [… They] are magical forms that establish a new set of abstract relations between individuals and things and impose those relations as real.’8 Tony Bennett’s crucial theory of ‘The Exhibitionary Complex’ provides a powerful insight into how Caillebotte’s act of representing society in his street scenes was necessarily embroiled in the ideological constitution and visualization of the social outlined by Crary.9 Bennett identifies in the late nineteenth century a shift towards a new form of spectacle and display whereby apparatuses of state surveillance were reversed in order to render power visible to the social body, and in so doing bind it as a collection of subjects, as a people. The drive to render the city of Paris visible and knowable as a totality, to open up its once private spaces to the prying eyes of tourists and sightseers, to document its public spaces with objectivity and scrutiny, was, Bennett argues, symptomatic of the cultural technologies he terms the ‘Exhibitionary Complex’. The presentation to society of a spectacle of itself conditioned the interiorization of the gaze of the state on the part of its subjects, and enabled an illusory fantasy of the assumption of the power of a ‘substantive controlling vision’.10 Postage stamps were, like photographs, a vital element of the ‘new commodity economy’ described by Crary, even more closely connected with the social power of money by virtue of being, like money, official documents whose value depended upon a denomination provided by the state and was guaranteed by their malleability to commodity exchange.11 Postage stamps emerged coextensively with, and thus came to betoken, a revolutionary global modernization of the post, which developed in the decades after the first British reforms of the 1840s into an intra- and international bureaucratic system of communication.12 Much like the telegraph and the railway, the post was an integral part of those social, economic and technological processes by which the nation state was rationalized, modernized and expanded.13 Furthermore as designed objects and elements of shared visual and print cultures, postage stamps were thus equally liable to signify and enact the modernization of the domain of the visual, and function as a form of social power, offering a mode of perception that was distinct from, and yet related to, photography. To identify the encounter with photography as the determining factor in Caillebotte’s way of seeing and painting is to problematically obscure Caillebotte’s relation to the more fundamental structural changes occurring in the domain of the visual itself (of which ‘the photographic’ was epiphenomenal). Peter Galassi and Kirk Varnedoe’s analysis of ‘Caillebotte’s space’ and the former’s analysis of ‘Caillebotte’s method’ are foundational texts for the association of Caillebotte with photography.14 They both seek to account for Caillebotte’s quasi-paradoxical twin attachments to, on the one hand, faithfully representing visual reality and, on the other, bizarre spatial and perspectival contrivances – his ‘looming foregrounds,

 Philately and Photography 63 tiny backgrounds, and exaggerated convergences’ – by reference to photography and optics.15 If Caillebotte should be thought of as communicating the ‘deliberately true’ by producing the ‘deliberately abnormal’, as Galassi and Varnedoe suggest, then perhaps it ought to come as a surprise that he would turn to a technical medium still then frequently thought of as having more in common with science than art.16 However, the Caillebotte described by Galassi and Varnedoe was attracted to the distortive as much as the descriptive attributes of a camera deliberately used improperly. Behind the mask of realism, Caillebotte put his detailed and site-specific observations through a drawn-out methodology of ‘persistent tinkering’ such that the reality of the observed scene was subtly altered to become strange and irresistible.17 Galassi goes as far as to argue that ‘the endless perspective manipulations in the Pont de l’Europe, the tight mathematical order of the Temps de Pluie, suggest a mind obsessed with control. … [For Caillebotte] methodical control was not only means; it was also meaning.’18 However, Galassi does not fully develop this perceptive and important point, only sketching in broad brushstrokes a nexus of mathematics, technology, photography and control. Galassi’s analysis implies that Caillebotte was attracted to photographic and optical technologies because they offered him a means to exert a degree of deliberate control over his visual world; however, why Caillebotte felt this compulsion to control, why this compulsion found its outlet in painting, is left unexplained. Moreover, the historical case for connecting Caillebotte with photography is often exclusively circumstantial. However much contemporaneous critics or contemporary scholars have found the comparison descriptively, rhetorically or hermeneutically

Figure 3.1  Gustave Caillebotte, Le Pont de L’Europe, 1876. 125 × 180 cm, oil on canvas. Musée de Petit Palais, Geneva.

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expedient, there is no direct evidence that Caillebotte practised photography.19 Moreover, Caillebotte’s brother Martial, whose photographic practice is typically taken as an integral and causative influence, took up the hobby after 1891, fourteen years after these so-called photographic paintings, and only three years before Caillebotte’s death.20 For all that united the representational vision of the brothers (‘that which Gustave painted, Martial photographed’), for all that was parallel in their lives, it cannot follow that Martial’s photography influenced Gustave’s painting.21 As we shall see, rather than photography, the passion that brought Gustave and Martial Caillebotte together in the 1870s and 1880s was stamp collecting. Galassi’s argument that Caillebotte’s paintings of Paris represent an obsession with control on the part of the artist, rather than the viewer, moreover puts Caillebotte out of step with the normative photographic Naturalism which dominated his aesthetic and visual-cultural contexts. Although Caillebotte certainly drew from this ‘photographic’ mode of perception in elucidating his subjective and idiosyncratic vision of society and its spaces, what is missing in the existing scholarship is an account of how Caillebotte filtered it through the prism of a personal philatelic visuality derived from his encounter with the stamp album and its psychological capacity to screen him from traumatic loss. Where the historical evidence for photographic activity on the part of Caillebotte is absent, ample evidence exists to suggest Caillebotte’s sustained exposure to a philatelic way of seeing and thinking.22 More than the instantaneous vision of the camera, which condenses all premeditation and planning into a single point of exposed spontaneity and contingency, Caillebotte’s deliberate (and deliberately slow) iterative method, in conjunction with his endlessly fragmented and recomposed pictorial structures, connotes the extended and focused work-time of collecting stamps and compiling the album.23 More than the all-over specularity of the camera’s lens, or its capacity to artificially deform or contract space, Caillebotte’s dynamic play between surface and depth, plunging perspectives and lines of non-converging convergence recall the philatelic juxtaposition and serialization of discrete images, the putting together of fragments to form a whole, the true significance of which resided neither in its completed form (What collection is ever truly complete?) nor in its individual components (What imperfect specimen can condense the collection’s metanarrative?), but in the minute gaps between them and in the principles of their organization, in whose shadow these gaps are discernible. The newly refashioned spaces of Haussmann’s Paris were among the very earliest subjects to capture Caillebotte’s attention. In Le Pont de l’Europe (Figure 3.1), Rue de Paris; temps de pluie (Plate 2) and Les Peintres en bâtiment (Figure 3.2), all exhibited in 1877, Caillebotte creates highly artificial spaces which nevertheless invite the viewer to read them as real, within which he repetitively stages a failed encounter between classes. The widened boulevards and modern infrastructure of these new areas of the city were distorted by Caillebotte, structured less according to the precepts of photographic veracity or traditional perspective than by a set of criteria extrinsic to their ostensible subject, developed a priori and then applied in such a way as to give the impression of spontaneous realism. The imposing metal trelliswork of Le Pont de l’Europe (Figure 3.1) is stretched as it approaches the surface of the canvas, twisting out of the recession

 Philately and Photography 65

Figure 3.2  Gustave Caillebotte, Les Peintres en bâtiment, 1877. 89 × 116 cm, oil on canvas. Private Collection, France. demanded by the apparent picture plane into a more oblique perspective that cuts across the plunging road and pavement. The space of Rue de Paris; temps de pluie (Plate 2) is anchored to an abstract and orthogonal surface structure which divides up space into quadrants and arranges the figures within it with mathematical precision. Les Peintres en bâtiment (Figure 3.2) combines these two distortive visual modes, emphasizing both the painting’s surface structure and unnaturalistic perspective. The figures who populate these unreal spaces do not interact with each other, indeed at times (as is the case with the daydreaming worker on the right of the Pont de l’Europe) even the light which falls on them is anomalous with respect to that which fills the rest of space, giving them an ethereal incongruity. When combined with the overriding orthogonal surface structure, the crisp contour, temporally frozen stiffness and detailed delineation of the umbrella-wielding pedestrians at the junction of rue de Moscou, rue Clapeyron and rue de Turin in Rue de Paris – which could otherwise be straightforwardly drawn from the rulebook of photographic Naturalism – the result is a cut-out effect, a sense of discord between figure and setting which implies a distinct origin for each. These cut-out figures are disciplined into an arrangement dictated by the golden ratio; this creation of a balanced artificial harmony was absolutely at odds with photographic Naturalism’s prioritization of the snapshot and its decidedly unidealized truth. Moreover, Caillebotte’s decision to preclude interaction between his figures, their environment and each other encodes a narrative ambiguity fundamentally at odds with Naturalism’s seemingly egalitarian mission towards universal legibility.

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Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

And yet, despite these idiosyncratic (but nevertheless well-concealed) aberrations from standards of veracity, some critics in 1877 – including Camille Lemonnier and Mario Proth – read Caillebotte’s paintings as direct analogues to photographs, as ‘unretouched photographs’ or ‘instantaneous photographs’.24 It is this critical trope, which had begun with Émile Zola’s 1876 indictment of Les raboteurs de parquet for replacing artistic temperament with photographic clarity (the subject of Part 3), that is often invoked to legitimize photographic readings of Caillebotte’s paintings.25 However, such explicit comparisons between Caillebotte’s canvases and photographs were not universal; the critics in 1877 did not always explicitly mobilize the language of the photographic in their judgement of Caillebotte. Much of the critical debate centred upon whether Caillebotte had succeeded or not in accessing and conveying the objective reality of his subjects. One critic writing under the name L.G. felt that Caillebotte’s development of ‘a veritable science of drawing and composition, a remarkable force of colour, albeit with very simple effects and very sober nuances’ was deserving of a ‘médaille d’honneur’.26 Jacques was in agreement that Caillebotte was possessing of ‘real qualities; his figures are realistic [bien campés]; the perspective is good.’27 For those less enamoured with Impressionism, such as E. Lepelletier, it was the issue of exaggeration that most irked, the feeling that the Impressionists weren’t being faithful to the detail and colour of the real scene; Caillebotte stood out from this cohort by delineating his scenes with ‘incredible precision’.28 Although it is tempting to read even these judgements as manifestations of the pervasive photographic critical topos described by Richard Thomson, they should instead be read in light of the underlying visual culture outlined by Crary and Bennett of which photography was the symptom, but not the synecdoche.29 Philately was an alternative system of visuality, one that shared with photography its materialist ontology of truth and tendency towards the production of socio-subjective totalities, but which offered a subtly different visual lexicon with which to materialize them. Here, and throughout the book, I self-consciously borrow Whitney Davis’s definition of ‘visuality’ as ‘the symbolic form of visual experience’, ‘the culturality of vision’.30 As Davis argues, vision and visibility operate within contexts of history and culture; vision, as he says, succeeds to visuality through a culturally situated historical process. As such, vision is cultural (and culture visual) by means of processes and in forms that are inherently historical. This historicity makes itself felt in the guise of analogic connections between the visual artefact and a cultural field that also includes the invisible.31 Thus, in placing Caillebotte’s way of seeing (‘a visuality [is] a way of seeing’) public space at the centre of my account, I am attempting to expose, firstly, its rootedness in a historically specific cultural field which included but was not totalized by photography and, secondly, its structural, analogic connections to the other way of seeing that dominated Caillebotte’s life at this historical moment: that of philately.32 Caillebotte’s monumental street scenes have been read as images about the politics of public space in Post-Commune Haussmannized Paris, the dynamics of class, the complexities of three-dimensional architectural space and its translation onto the canvas, atomized modern urban subjectivity and a tribute to material progress.33 As we have seen in the previous chapter, other scholars have sought to draw out Caillebotte’s

 Philately and Photography 67 subjective psychosexual investments, emphasizing the ways in which the painter was able to saturate these scenes of anonymous ennui with sexual and material desires.34 Pissarro aside (another artist sensitive to moments of contact between the polarized class constituencies of late nineteenth-century France), Caillebotte was the only artist of the Impressionist group to tackle Haussmann’s Paris so directly and extensively, perhaps indicating a personal significance that extended beyond his ostensible aesthetic loyalties to Impressionism.35 In responding to internal and external imperatives towards unity, Caillebotte compellingly, if not necessarily consciously, communicates his experience of his fractured social reality. Le Pont de l’Europe and Rue de Paris; temps de pluie, sites close to Caillebotte’s residence, represent scenes that would have been familiar to him, momentarily experienced in fragmented form as he travelled between his home and his meetings with his Impressionist colleagues at the Café Guerbois and the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes. As such, these spaces were ‘intimately connected with negotiating the social disparity between the upper-bourgeois world of his family and the artistic avant-garde of his friends’.36 It was in parsing this admixture of sociosubjective hybridity and strife that Caillebotte was to find fertile the stamp album’s flat and gridded aesthetic, as well as its capacity to produce narrative meaning from the ordered, iterative and serialized juxtaposition of discrete visual signifiers. In both subject and style, Caillebotte’s monumental street scenes mark his distance from the Impressionist group alongside whom he had only just been invited to exhibit. Critics in 1877 were keen to draw their reader’s attention to the anomalousness of Caillebotte’s canvases: Roger Ballu questioned whether Caillebotte had not ‘usurped’ the title of Impressionist in light of his shoddy compositions and poor drawing, whereas Victor Fournel felt that it was precisely Caillebotte’s skill that separated him from his peers: ‘[Caillebotte] knows how to paint well enough that we would advise him to leave the impressionists quickly, if he doesn’t want to be left by them.’37 Likewise, the critic for La Petite République française felt that ‘M. Caillebotte is an Impressionist in name only. He knows how to draw and paint more seriously than his comrades.’38 Other critics emphasized Caillebotte’s skill for naturalistic observation, and the trueto-life grandeur of his figures.39 Ultimately, Charles Bigot summarized this categorical confusion, asking his readers: ‘Is he really an “Impressionist”, this M. Caillebotte?’, before confounding the issue still further by answering in both the affirmative and the negative.40 Ostensibly then – and as the prevalence of photographic readings of these canvases in the secondary literature would suggest – if not categorizable as Impressionist, Caillebotte’s paintings would have more in common with the then freshly coalescing Naturalist style of the late 1870s, which drew extensively from photography to produce in precise detail a veritable encyclopaedia of contemporary French life which included, unlike their Impressionist competitors, Haussmannized streets and their denizens. Caillebotte’s Naturalist contemporaries became fascinated with the streets of Paris as the site of specifically modern visual experiences. Naturalist painters like Jean Béraud produced a photographic taxonomy of the Parisian streets, indexing and codifying the appearance and behaviour of their inhabitants, elevating the everyday to the spectacular. A brief examination of Béraud’s paradigmatic works will serve to

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demonstrate what it meant and looked like to paint photographically in 1877; the gaps and discrepancies between Béraud’s and Caillebotte’s respective visualizations of Paris reveal a certain distance on the part of the latter from photography (whose influence on painting in this historical moment is exemplified by the former) that requires explaining in terms other than photography. Béraud’s Le dimanche, près de Saint-Philippe-du-Roule (Figure 3.3), also exhibited in 1877, but at the Salon, is typical of this genre of street painting, wherein precisely observed figures painted in minute detail and delineated with a heightened crispness of contour are frozen by the gaze of the painter; they do not pose, but nevertheless articulate readily legible movements and postures characteristic of their identity and activity. These figures are located in a naturalistic space that readily translates to its extant index, conferring a strong sense of authenticity and typicality. Béraud’s tight finish and deep focus totalize space within the frame, invisibly ordering what presents itself as reality unfiltered. Indeed, whatever their opinion of Béraud’s aesthetic merit, the majority of critics seemed to agree that his paintings were faithful documents of Parisian life.41 Caillebotte would certainly have been aware of the example being set by Béraud, since they were close friends and members of the same haut bourgeois social circle.42 Their lives crossed at numerous critical moments: both men came from bourgeois families, each had aspirations to practice law that were interrupted by the outbreak

Figure 3.3  Jean Béraud, Le dimanche, près de Saint-Philippe-du-Roule, 1877. 59.4 × 81.0 cm, oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 55.35.

 Philately and Photography 69 of war with Prussia; they served together in the Garde Mobile de la Seine during the Siege of Paris (alongside Puvis de Chavannes, Manet, Degas and Meissonier); they both studied under Léon Bonnat, each leaving his tutelage around 1875 in search of an independent style, remaining friends afterwards.43 Béraud’s style drew heavily from the Naturalist aesthetic, depicting Paris as a colourful and quotidian spectacle of the anecdotal, a bourgeois fantasy of the city as knowable, and therefore controllable. It is possible to characterize the officially sanctioned and dominant aesthetic that Béraud exemplified as fundamentally photographic for a number of reasons. Firstly, its key artists such as Jules Bastien-Lepage, Léon Lhermitte and Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret utilized photographs as part of their extensive preparatory process.44 These Naturalists experimented with the specifics of their composition, arrangement and posture with photographs, in place of or in addition to sketched studies. Alternatively, others followed Zola’s example in photographing people and places in order to compile a documentary catalogue, aiming to create a repository of images against which the veracity of their future paintings could be measured.45 Secondly, Naturalism’s very project and purpose – its contemporaneity and descriptiveness, its mission to record objectively and impersonally both the most mundane and novel facts of modern life in such a way that they could be readily consumed by the public at large – overlapped significantly with the conceptualization of photography as the product and producer of scientific and technological knowledge.46 Thirdly, Naturalists drew directly from the visuality of the photographic image. They adopted its all-over sheen, crisply delineated forms, precise detail and abrupt cropping; they utilized its capacity to totalize space, freeze motion in hithertofore imperceptible configurations and the related effect of having entered a narrative in medias res.47 This instantaneous temporality was, for Marnin Young, the key factor in distinguishing the modern in late nineteenth-century European painting: a paradigm by which Naturalism and Impressionism opposed the lasting influence of mid-century Realism.48 Last, and most significantly, Naturalism depended upon an unspoken alliance with photography for its aura of authenticity; Naturalism’s pretence to truth was bolstered by its visual conformity to the photographic view of the world. Photography offered a visual lexicon which was readily consumed as if real, supported by a culture of secrecy within the naturalist community, whereby, as Gabriel Weisberg and Jean-François Rauzier note, painters and critics were precluded from acknowledging that ‘the illusion of reality’ they created depended upon photographic technologies, lest the common perception of their having direct access to truth be imperilled.49 Béraud’s Le boulevard Poissonière sous la pluie, from around 1885, presents a kind of diorama of daily life: a light-hearted scene of Parisians navigating their soggy city, shielding themselves under black umbrellas, slipping on the slick street or dashing for cover.50 Béraud’s small and numerous figures lean and bend, sweep and slip across the canvas. Béraud drew liberally from the snapshot aesthetic, freezing motion at its most ridiculous, extreme and comical; his composition is a studied mixture of order – the linear recession of buildings and horse-drawn carriages into pictorial space – and disorder, in which the jostle of umbrellas on the pavement is matched by the precarious and horizontal motion of figures as they cut across the path of the carriages.

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Figure 3.4  Jean Béraud, Sur le bouvleard, c. mid-1880s. 53.3 × 37.5 cm, oil on canvas. The Haggin Museum, Stockton, California. Béraud’s Sur le boulevard (Figure 3.4), painted in the mid-1880s, exhibits the fashionably attired residents of and visitors to Paris’ Right Bank through a series of juxtaposed narrative moments. The presence of the Pavillion de Hanovre on the left of the canvas identifies the location as the boulevard des Italiens, a site sporting the colourful poster-clad advertising column ubiquitous across Paris in the 1880s. On the left of the canvas, partially cropped, a bearded and guidebook-wielding tourist strolls into the frame, surveying his surroundings as if they were contained within a painting on the wall of a gallery. In the centre, two fashionably dressed bourgeois men perform a formal greeting, the leftmost raising his top hat in a display of civility. The gentleman on the right, dressed completely in black, carries in his free hand a newspaper – close observation of its partially revealed cover reveals that it is quite possibly La Croix, a daily Catholic paper founded in 1880 – perhaps purchased from the kiosk behind him, signifying a degree of engagement with public affairs proper to a man of his station. Béraud could also here be referencing the controversial politics of laïcité, the secularization of society promulgated by the Third Republic, that would certainly have been current and legible to his bourgeois audience. A worker dressed in a green apron stands behind these two gentlemen, observing from afar this public performance of a masculine bourgeois sociability from which he will be forever excluded. To his left, a messenger-boy skips across the scene, carrying in his left hand an envelope with whose

 Philately and Photography 71 delivery he is surely charged. Behind him, a fashionable woman browses the shopwindow display; above her the signage reads ‘… de VENTE’, a witty allusion to the ongoing spectacularization of street life and commodification of social relations, the easy equivalence between the sale of goods and (female) bodies and the dangers and delights of sexualized looking that had, since Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames (written around the same time as Béraud’s painting in 1883) coalesced around the signifier of the department store. On the right, another woman raises her short walkingskirt (typical of fashion in the mid-1880s) to reveal her ankles and underskirt to the absorbed delight of the uniformed policeman, reinforcing the thematic of voyeuristic pleasure, this time tinged with the public exercise of state power. Between the shop signage, the newspaper and the advertising column, Béraud’s painting superimposes a framework of textuality that, while authentic to the actual experience of walking the streets of Paris, functions to condition a viewing praxis wherein the painting is read.51 This dynamic of universal legibility, the saturation of the surface-symbolic with authentic and anecdotal textual and visual details that could be consumed by everyone, was central to Naturalism’s ideological obfuscation of its phantasmic support. The fantasy of the painting’s isomorphic quality with regard to its ‘real’ index constituted a defensive mechanism screening the subject of ideology from the realities of a society beset by class antagonism, economic and political scandal, competing claims for political legitimacy from Monarchists, fears of rampant feminine sexuality combined with impotent masculinity and fears of depopulation and degeneration. It was in bolstering this ideological fantasy of Naturalism’s supposed ‘authenticity’ that, as we have seen, photography was chiefly operative. Photography, as adopted by painters like Béraud, was ideally suited to aiding in the fulfilment of Naturalism’s task of ‘transparently’ representing the social because it operated within a visual-cultural regime wherein the social itself was always already constituted as a spectacle, consumed in the register of the photographic. Vanessa Schwartz has emphasized how mass culture in the late nineteenth century responded to a traffic between the mundane and the spectacular, whereby everyday life was increasingly symbolized and experienced as a visual spectacle.52 She identifies a popular taste in the late nineteenth century for those cultural artefacts which ostensibly emerged from and remained connected to the everyday experience they shared. These cultural phenomena positioned their consumers as spectators of a visual spectacle which actually constructed the (shared experience of) everyday ‘reality’ it supposedly merely signified. As Jonathan Crary argues, it was not the case that the invention of photography caused a rupture in visual experience, but rather that it responded to an extrinsic shift in vision itself by which reality and its mechanical production became indistinguishable.53 This naturalist genre drew from a photographic corpus, spearheaded by Charles Nègre’s staged street portraits of chimney sweeps and itinerant entertainers, which traded on the ‘simulated spontaneity of the everyday’.54 In his attempts to figure this spectacle of the social in his Parisian street scenes, Caillebotte adulterated the Naturalist, photographic coordinates by which they were normatively understood and visualized with the forms and procedures of his stamp collection. The philatelic visuality to which

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Caillebotte was habitually exposed in these years emerged from the same stream as that in which photography, Naturalism and Haussmannized Paris were rendered visible and meaningful at this historical moment; thus, its function was not to effect rupture, but rather to carve out for Caillebotte the discursive space within the dominant ideology of the Third Republic from which he could give vent to his idiosyncratic, liminal and alienated experience. Caillebotte painted Paris as if it were already a photograph itself, subtly subverting and adulterating the normative manifestations of, while remaining within the remit of, the Naturalist mentalité of his age. The first step in mapping the philatelic terrain of Caillebotte’s painterly vision is to outline how the stamp album functioned in the sphere of Caillebotte’s visual economy and experience.55 The remnants of the majority of Caillebotte’s stamp collection are currently housed at the British Library, having been fully amalgamated into the collection of Thomas Keay Tapling (the Tapling Collection) before its donation to the British Museum and eventual relocation to the British Library. Although no records exist that allow us to identify precisely which stamps belonged to the Caillebottes, we are able to make an approximate reconstruction of that collection. As James A. Mackay remarks: Undoubtedly … the Tapling Collection owed much to purchases of large collections already formed by earlier philatelists. … In 1887 [Tapling] acquired the collection amassed by the French brothers Martial and Georges [sic.] Caillebotte for £5,000. [This, along with a smaller purchase from W. E. Image] form[s] the major portion of the Tapling Collection … Tapling used the Caillebotte material as the foundation of a re-arranged collection, disposing of the surplus items in his existing collection.56

Moreover, Tapling was so impressed with the bespoke organizational framework devised by the Caillebottes that he adopted it wholesale, reorganizing the entirety of his new hybrid collection along their lines.57 That the Tapling collection is organized according to the French school of philately, in which the collector acquires a vast array of slight variations of each single design, rather than the English school, where a single example of each design is sufficient, perhaps confirms this influence.58 The Tapling Collection was organized according to an overarching set of criteria forming a nested hierarchy, giving every stamp a specific place in the overall series. The stamps were hinged and glued to numbered loose-leaf album sheets, so that both sides were available for visible scrutiny. The first level of organization was alphabetically by issuing nation such that, for example, all French stamps were grouped together. Within this set, they were organized chronologically by design, then face value, reprint status, colour (both hue and shade), presence of errors (such as special têtes-bêches or other errors in perforation, design or printing), presence and type of perforation or rouletting, the printing process used, type and design variations. They were carefully arranged in a regular grid pattern across the page and framed by textual information detailing the name of the engraver, the name of the printer, the date of issue, type of paper, perforation and watermarking information.59 The collection consisted chiefly of

 Philately and Photography 73 postage stamps, although there are other types, including telephone stamps; however, no documentary evidence exists to suggest that Caillebotte collected non-postage stamps. Although the present physical setting dates only from the collection’s accession to the British Museum between May 1892 and 1895, Mackay confirms that not only did Tapling mandate that its integrity and internal structure not be altered from that which he (via the Caillebottes) used, but also he entrusted his ‘close friend and collaborator’ Edward Denny Bacon to oversee its transfer.60 The stamp collection can thus be experienced as a set of series, with stamps grouped according to their emergent properties, and ordered logically so that these properties become most discernible. Sheet eight of the French section provides a striking example of such ordering on the basis of colour, wherein twenty-two examples of the French Type Empire, August 1853 issue, are grouped together and then arranged in a grid, and ordered based on colour-value ranging from light-yellow to deep ochre (Plate 4). Other sheets group together minor variations in design, such as the location of the central effigy in relation to the border (Figure 2.2), or juxtapose errors, aberrations or irregularities with more normative examples (Figure 3.5). The stamp album as a taxonomy of minutiae and errata out of which emerges perfect order is connected to philatelic discourses about the very purpose of the pursuit, as well as the Caillebottes’ world-recognized expertise in ‘plating’ the Sydney View Stamps.61 Typically, sheets of hundreds of stamps were mechanically produced

Figure 3.5  Tapling Collection, France Sheet 32. Stamp album sheet. British Library, Philatelic Collections. By permission of the British Library.

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in exact facsimile from one original die, drawing, stone or lithograph paper. However, occasionally, when mechanical processing was not possible, the design for each individual stamp was separately drawn or engraved by hand, necessarily producing very slight variations across the sheet.62 The most famous example of this is the Sydney View stamps, produced on plates containing twenty-five designs. In ‘plating’ the Sydney View stamps, as Caillebotte is known to have done, the goal was not only to add an example of each variant to one’s collection but also to ‘allot each specimen to the position it once occupied on the original sheet’.63 The Philatelic Record likewise noted that the Caillebottes were best known within the international philatelic community for their work with ‘that exceptionally troublesome class of stamps, the sheets of which consist of a number of minor varieties of type’.64 The orthogonal order of the stamp album is thus comprehensible as an attempt to restore the originating morphology of stamp manufacture, erasing the traces of usage. The philatelic fetishization of errata more generally suggests even more this concern with ordering in relation to a presupposed ideal; for example, têtes-bêches stamps – a pair of joined stamps produced by a printing error whereby one stamp was printed upside-down in relation to the other – feature prominently in the Tapling Collection.65 Placed alongside more paradigmatic specimens, such errata stamps offer a symbolic value that far exceeds the economic value conferred by their inherent scarcity. Just as the serialization of slight variations points in the direction of an impossibly perfect ideal design, one unsullied by the inevitable wear and tear of objects, aberrations function to delineate the boundaries or limits of meaning. Although we do not know if Caillebotte contributed these specimens, the fact that he reserved from the bulk sale to Tapling a single stamp for sale by auction – a very rare Uruguayan 180-cento 1858 erroneously printed in dull vermilion rather than green – indicates that, at the very least, he was cognizant of their value.66 It might be tempting to conceptualize the stamp album as a site of tension between object and image, to think phenomenologically about Caillebotte’s experience of his stamps. Indeed, such a path might be suggested by the priority stamp collectors give to the physical condition of a stamp when assigning value.67 We might thus think about Caillebotte’s La Partie de bésigue (Plate 6) as André Dombrowski conceptualizes Cézanne’s card players – a comparison Dombrowski himself raises – by considering the allegorical encoding of the painter’s process in the visual representation of card play, which focuses on the play of ‘vision’ and ‘thing’, the oscillation of ocular and physical registers.68 However, what separates stamps from other object elements of visual culture, like cards, is the taboo on touching. Once the stamps are possessed by a collector, they immediately become purely visual objects, and their very materiality is disavowed behind a prohibition against touching; lest the collector damage the stamp, flat-head philatelic tweezers were recommended as a stand in for hands. ‘Regardez, mais ne touchez pas’ was very much the standard advice.69 The duality between image and object, between visuality and function, characteristic of so much visual-cultural material and, indeed, stamps as they are used in everyday life, thus collapses into pure visuality once the stamp crosses the threshold of the collector and enters his album.70

 Philately and Photography 75 The visual experience of the stamp album, a quasi-pointillist ensemble of designed objects, of miniature images, is thus determined by the conceptual principles of organization to which they are subjected: colours and hues coalesce together and progress in an orderly fashion from dark to light, similar designs are grouped and then juxtaposed with cognates and variations (Figure 2.2). The tight-grid structure regiments space on the page and leads the eye along columns and rows with the result that it never rests on a singular design for too long. These principles of organization not only determined the ultimate visual and conceptual form of the stamp collection but also preceded its actual production, existing as a system of ordering independent of any subsequent actualization. The overriding visual impression of the collection is one of careful and orthogonal order, seriality, iteration and repetition. A holistic ideal of each variety of stamp is dialectically produced by the exhaustive juxtapositions of its really existing variations. By way of reference to Wittgenstein’s writings on language games and George Kubler’s ‘rule of series’, Whitney Davis, in elucidating his General Theory of Visual Culture, remarks upon how the rules or principles of any particular language game (chess or bridge in Kubler’s more narrow analogy for the ‘history of things’, signsystems and language itself in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s more expansive one), increasingly over time, come to limit the possibility of radical iterative change and encourage morphological sameness.71 Although Davis is more interested in investigating those moments when different language games produce morphologically indistinguishable results, his discussion is useful here because it highlights how the principles of organization by which a sign-system constitutes itself can ultimately determine its form, and, more importantly, how iterative social practice (with its tendency towards homogeny) strengthens rather than weakens this originating influence. The more time goes on, the harder it becomes to break away from the patterns established early in the game, patterns which are themselves a function of the principles by which the game is itself constituted. The visual form of the stamp album should thus not be read as a function of Caillebotte’s serially iterative practice in collecting the stamps and compiling the stamp album; rather, both were epiphenomenal with respect to the predetermined organizational principles of the collection, the rules by which the ‘game’ of stamp collecting in general was played. It is thus the predetermined character of its organizational parameters that distinguishes the stamp collection, as a set of visually iterative series, from other serial visual-cultural phenomena. Jennifer Dyer has argued that seriality was a fundamental feature of modernist activity, a core concern for painters from Edgar Degas to Andy Warhol, as well as writers (Woolf, Proust, Stein), philosophers (Bergson, Russell) and psychoanalysts (Freud).72 Dyer identifies what she terms ‘serial iteration’ to be the embodiment of the structure of modernism itself. She defines seriality as a consistent structure by which intra- and intertextual connections are made, a series is a set of terms so linked, and serial iteration is a series in which each term builds upon the previous.73 She cites Degas’s post-1880 female dancers and bathers as examples of a kind of iterative and serialized visual production, wherein Degas’s intertextual practice of tracing, reusing and recombining figures within and between compositions – as well

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as the pasting together of different sheets with visible joins – iterates not on the female form itself but rather on the procedural generation of that form, encoding in his late pastels his own endlessly repetitive activity.74 This sense of orthogonality betokening serial iteration is the basis of Dyer’s critique of Rosalind Krauss’s writing on the grid as an icon of modern art. In ‘Grids’ and ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde’, Krauss defines the orthogonal grid, which emerged in Cubist painting and became ‘ever more stringent and manifest’ in the course of the twentieth century, as the structure through which painting announced itself as autonomous and new.75 For Krauss, the grid is a metaphysical plastic structure which, with its flat, geometric order, resists the discursive, the mimetic, the natural and the real.76 Crucially, as Krauss develops, the grid structure is integrally related to the myth of avantgarde originality, and the connected but repressed function of repetition. The synthetic and autonomous purity of the grid feels like a kind of historical rupture, a shedding of the past in favour of the new, emblematizing the absolute self-creation mythos of the avantgarde. And yet, its restrictive and inflexible status engendered endless repetition rather than creation: ‘Structurally, logistically, axiomatically, the grid can only be repeated.’77 Moreover, this repetition, which creates intertextual series from among art in the sphere of modernism, functioned without reference to an original grid: the modernist grid is ‘a system of reproductions without an original’.78 As such the copy is the ‘underlying condition of the original’, a fact closer to the surface of consciousness in the nineteenth century than in the twentieth century, before the repressive apparatuses of modernism.79 Krauss cites treatises on physiological optics – the gridded illustrations within which surely drew from the tradition that stretched back to the fifteenth century of elucidating perspectival space with grids – as the mechanism through which nineteenth-century artists, eager to expand their knowledge of vision, encountered the grid ‘as an emblem of the infrastructure of vision’ – ‘a matrix of knowledge’ which conveyed the ‘separation of the perceptual screen from that of the “real” world’.80 Dyer, contrariwise, ‘hold[s] that the structure Krauss discusses is less accurately described as grid-like than as serially iterative [… and so] emphatically discursive [… :] the ordering process presented in the serially iterative structure of visual art is dynamic, ongoing, and persistent [rather than antinatural, antimimetic or antireal]’.81 Superficially, the encoding of the activity of the painter described by Dyer vis-à-vis Degas would support my argument that Caillebotte became stuck on the repetitive work of painting as a re-enactment of the trauma of class alienation and personal loss. Indeed, the orthogonal materiality of the visible joins between Degas’s conjoined sheets would seem to be analogous to the orthogonality of the stamp album and the gridded regularity of canvases like Rue de Paris; temps de pluie. However, where my Caillebotte differs from Dyer’s Degas is in the emphasis Dyer places on serial iteration as an active process. Dyer argues that ‘serially iterative ordering … emphasises … the activity of ordering’ because it is this activity that, in introducing the freedom and contingency of actualization, prevents iteration from falling into mere repetition. Caillebotte’s stamp album, however, recalls the fixed and fixing power of the grid as Krauss describes it, in the circumscription of iterative potentiality, the emphasis on

 Philately and Photography 77 repetition and the foregrounding of the determining function of invariable geometrical laws. Indeed, stamp collecting, as we have seen, was at its core a process of repetition. The intertexuality of stamps in an album is not the decentralized ad hoc relation of a typical series (understood in Dyer’s thinking as a chain of transitive but sequential relations, one term to another, a then b then c), but rather requires constant reference to the perfect prototype stamp, the image of which is constructed in the relations of its really existing variations. The seriality of the multiple series of stamps that constitute the stamp album emerges not in the activity of the collector, but rather pre-exists him. Stamps were deliberately issued in series, a fact of which the state was conscious, and it was the activity of quotidian communication that caused a rupture in this originating seriality.82 The activity of the collector thus lies in recovering, rather than creating, this lost seriality.83 The stamp collection produces visual meaning by the serialized, iterative and orthogonal ordering of fragmentary image-objects. However, experienced as a recovery rather than a creation, these procedures of meaning production are grounded by an appeal to the order of a pre-existing reality. This lost order is thus the locus of the organizational principles which constitute the collection in the first place. As such, while taking the appearance of an iterative becoming, the stamp album remains resolutely fixed in the visual morphology bequeathed by the principles which ordered the prior reality it ostensibly recovers. As we shall see, not only did Caillebotte’s painting draw from the stamp album elements of this visual morphology, but also the processes of meaning production that underpinned them: the building-up of visual meaning through the apparently serialized and iterative repetition of a single visual motif across a surface, grounded in an appeal to lost order which fixes the activity of the signifying chain, ossifying it into a particular constellation. These dialectics of before/ after, order/disorder, inherent in my understanding of the visual and epistemological praxis of philately, resonated acutely with the fractious ideological politics of the last years of the 1870s, which were dominated by the contrasting dynamics of fracture and containment. In the following chapter, I will excavate the ideological, bureaucratic function of postage stamps and the postal system, arguing that the philatelic elements in the form of Caillebotte’s 1877 street scenes constituted an idiosyncratic intervention into the politics of his historical moment.

4

Philatelic impressionism

It is perhaps safe to say that within this decade of Philatelic existence the [brothers Caillebotte] exhibited a sustained power of investigation, laborious study, and a rapid accumulation of stamps – up to the very highest rarities – that has never been surpassed, if equalled, in the annals of stamp collecting.1 The London Philatelist, 1894 In my analysis of the deep and heretofore unacknowledged connections between Caillebotte’s philatelic and painterly practices, I am attentive to three levels of connection. The first is the level of visual morphology and of style. Tired categorical questions regarding Caillebotte’s style (hovering somewhere between Realism and Impressionism) are reinvigorated with hermeneutic potential when viewed through the prism of this philatelic connection.2 The stamp album was a rich visual sourcebook for a painter who, unlike many of his contemporaries, was not necessarily personally invested in the abstract questions of art per se. The visual morphology of the stamp album is characterized by a strong appeal to surface, a rational and consistent orthogonal organizational schema, a dynamic tension between overall effect and precise detail, clearly delineated units, and the repetition, serialization and iteration of slight variations on a single motif. The second level concerns the manner in which the painting leverages these elements to produce meaning. In the stamp album meaning is relational and serial, produced out of the juxtaposition of discrete units in such a manner as to relate a priori laws of ordering under the cover of serially iterative actualization. Rosalind Krauss’s writings on ‘the grid’ have offered a means to think about Caillebotte’s canvas as a locus of repetition and ordering whose orthogonality is ‘a matrix of knowledge’.3 The third level pertains to the specific meanings produced. The stamp album claims to restore the original serial order of a sphere of cultural artefacts that have been disordered by regular usage by re-imposing the principles of organization by which this ur-order was first fashioned. The work of the collector lies in unpicking what life has made messy, rediscovering the sanctity of a presupposed and ideal ‘before’. These dialectics of before/after, order/disorder resonated with the ideologically saturated terrain of Haussmannized Paris after the Commune that Caillebotte had taken for his subject. The Commune was experienced as a shattering of the normative social and material fabric, as a historical rupture.4 Whether it was

 Philatelic Impressionism 79 seen to have created new forms of social order, or indulged in the spectacular anarchy of disorder, the Commune became a touchstone for discourses of order and disorder in the political culture of the early Third Republic.5 Thanks to its indelible association with the Commune, Paris acquired a distinctive social and cultural geography that resonated with the contrast between order and disorder; where the Commune was represented as the invasion of Paris’s streets by the workers and the poor, the task of the Republic was to reclaim those spaces for bourgeois order.6 The (contested) symbolic transformation of Paris from a site of disorder into one of order was thus essential to the very mission of the Republic: the transformation of an unruly crowd into citizens.7 Nevertheless, the political climate of the early Third Republic was anything but orderly. Public opinion was extraordinarily fluid, the different apparatuses of government became intractably divided and the state lurched from botched restorations (of the Legitimist pretender comte de Chambord in 1871 and 1874) to constitutional crisis (Seize Mai 1876).8 When Caillebotte exhibited Le Pont de l’Europe (Figure 3.1), Rue de Paris; temps de pluie (Plate 2) and Les Peintres en bâtiment (Figure 3.2) in April 1877, the future, past and present of the Third Republic thus remained unsettled. It was only with the triumph of the Republicans in the following decades that the hoped-for peace and order was, to an extent, restored. Painted in this politically and ideologically turbulent moment then, Caillebotte’s exploration of the interrelated dynamics of class, sociability, object-driven performativity and the built environment connects layers of ordering in form and subject to articulate a vision of the social organism traversed by the tension between individuality and collectivity, anxieties regarding class and its mandated public performance, and concerns about the deleterious effects of modernity and urbanization. I argue that, first, in this effort he came to lean on the structuring principles that governed his contemporaneously constituted stamp album and that, secondly, this philatelically inflected visuality was especially pertinent given the structural homologies between the post and Haussmannized Paris. Collecting is fundamentally a process by which the collector narrativizes his or her subjective experience.9 The collection is a symbolic system analogous to narrative, which produces meaning by putting signifiers into a certain relational constellation. The material substructure of the collection, however, is not mute, but rather carries with it a weight of symbolic and phantasmic associations that can either support or resist the collector’s self-reflexive narrative ordering. The narrative of the stamp collection, the story it tells, therefore, is as much about the ideological, political, aesthetic, technological, social and communicative discourses, norms and practices by which the stamps themselves were produced and consumed, as it is about the collector’s experience of himself and his desire. Postage stamps were elements of a shared, state-centred and state-sanctioned visual culture. They acted as carriers for the official iconography of the state, as a medium for the symbolic elucidation of forms of political power.10 Moreover, they were official bureaucratic documents which betokened the state’s mediating and filtering role in the communicative life of its private citizens. The production of postage stamps and the functioning of the postal service were both loci of work whose interface was perfectly crystallized in the image of the obliterated (cancelled) postage stamp.11 Stamps

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ambiguously straddled the division between currency and commodity: like money, postage stamps bore a state-sanctioned face value and seemed to offer the promise of fungible and liquid exchange; however, unlike money, whose value was, at this time, backed by it being redeemable for an equivalent value of gold (the gold standard), the value of stamps was fiduciary (i.e. possessing of a value guaranteed only by government legislation and consumer confidence). Moreover, constraints placed on the use of postage stamps as a currency restricted their value within the wider economy.12 Likewise, the exchange value placed on stamps by collectors, based as much on the physical properties of the individual specimen as on the market dynamics of supplyand-demand, was not exclusively defined by face value or inherently fungible. (Two stamps of the same design and face value were not necessarily mutually substitutable.) The reform, rationalization and expansion of the postal service in nineteenthcentury France after the introduction of the postage stamp on 1 January 1849 served two parallel functions. The first was the practical and bureaucratic role of offering a vital public service to citizens; the second was purely ideological: the postal service was a complex of interconnected systems which articulated in spectacular fashion the power and capacity of the state to taxonomize, order and organize its subjects in hithertofore unprecedented ways. The spectacular demonstration of the power of the state to constitute a particular arrangement of the social was likewise at the core of Haussmann’s renovations of Paris. This intertwining of the post and Haussmannization around the pole of power and visibility meant that, first, Caillebotte would, consciously or otherwise, find the visuality (visual morphology and structures of visual meaning production) of the stamp album a useful model in his paintings of Haussmannized Paris and, secondly, largely confine this influence to these paintings.13 The unique combination of, on the one hand, the radical subjective autonomy over the worldin-microcosm offered by collecting, and, on the other, the particular ideological meanings indelibly inscribed on the objects of this collection, was one which offered a compelling visual language with which Caillebotte was able to think through each. The modern French postal service can trace its origins to Louis XI’s reintroduction of relays at the end of the fifteenth century.14 Centuries of incremental reform during the Ancien Régime created an extensive system for royal communications, which was to be nationalized as a public service during the Revolution.15 It was only in the nineteenth century, however, that the postal service assumed its distinctly modern form, taking its place ‘under the sign of technological progress’.16 Successive reforms, including the introduction of postal orders for the transfer of money in 1817, of daily deliveries in 1828 and of a rural service in 1830, set the stage for the issuance of the first French postage stamp on 1 January 1849.17 This stamp, engraved by Jacques-Jean Barre, and printed by Anatole Hulot at the Hôtel des Monnaies, bears the effigy of Cérès, a classical and agricultural allegorical figure representing the Republic.18 The decree of 24 August 1848 which legislated for the introduction of postage stamps also harmonized postal tariffs and created the organization for the manufacture of postage stamps under the authority of the commission des Monnaies et Médailles. These reforms encountered hostile resistance from the Finance Ministry, opposition which put further comprehensive reform all but on hold until France joined the Union postale

 Philatelic Impressionism 81 universelle in 1878.19 Postal reform, including the issuance of the postage stamp, was thus a vital component in the Second Republic’s strategy of self-legitimization; given that the new Republic came to power through revolution and deposition, postagestamp design offered it a powerful avenue with which to forge the ideological belief in its timeless authority in the minds of its citizens. Postage stamp design was likewise a powerful instrument in Napoléon III’s propaganda campaigns. To cement his rule as president of the Second Republic, in August 1852 Louis-Napoléon replaced the effigy of Cérès with one of himself, while maintaining the overall design. These stamps, known as the Type Présidence, bear the name of ‘REPUB. FRANC.’ and visually enact the complete collapsing of the state onto the body of its ruler. Louis-Napoléon, as head of state, takes his place within an ostensibly unchanged framework, yet usurps the authority to bear the weight of symbolic association previously entrusted only to allegory. Although Louis-Napoléon was the first French ruler to appear on stamps, the practice was already common in other European nations, perhaps most notably with Queen Victoria appearing on the very first modern postage stamp in Britain.20 Following the December 1852 coup d’état which inaugurated the Second Empire, Napoléon III erased even these last symbolic vestiges of the Republic, again redesigning French stamps, with the inscription ‘EMPIRE FRANC.’ first replacing ‘REPUB. FRANC.’ on 17 August 1853. In 1863 these Type Empire stamps were replaced with Type Empire lauré, featuring an updated effigy of Napoléon III, this time sporting the classical motif of the victor’s crown of laurel to celebrate the Empire’s military successes against Austria. Napoléon applied these domestic politics to the administration of his Imperial holdings. After a successful conclusion to the War of the French Intervention and the installation of the Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico as puppet ruler, it was decided in 1866 that the portrait of Miguel Hidalgo y Hidalgo on Mexican stamps ought to be replaced with that of Maximilian I.21 The short-lived reign of Maximilian on both the Mexican throne and Mexican stamps is significant not only because it demonstrates the widespread politicization of stamp design by Napoléon III and his administration but also because Caillebotte took a special interest in Mexican stamps. Gustave and Martial Caillebotte published an extensive study of Mexican stamps, in which they detailed the historical development of postage stamps in Mexico, and produced a catalogue ranging from 15 July 1856 to January 1884, which paid specific attention to the practice of overprinting surcharges in different geographical locations throughout Mexico.22 Their study assumes a detached, scholarly air and remains more or less uninterested in contextualizing stamps, apart from using the geography of Mexico to make comprehensible the extensive system of overprinting and surcharges, examples of which feature prominently in the Tapling Collection.23 As such, it passes over Maximilian I’s short reign without any special mention. Perhaps, by the late 1880s, the political significance and emotive charge of the events that had, for example, prompted Manet to paint a biting critique of Napoléon III was fading. Nevertheless, Caillebotte must surely have been aware of the crisis in confidence in his rule that Napoléon III’s failed Mexican escapade had provoked. Likewise, Caillebotte would

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have been cognizant of the strategy of utilizing the iconography of the stamp as an official document to function as a signifier of political legitimacy. An image published in the 26 May 1866 edition of Le Monde Illustré, depicting a Visite de la Mission chinoise à l’Hôtel des Postes (Figure 4.1) indicates the extent to which the postal service was bound up in the Second Empire’s image of itself as a modern, modernizing and efficient nation. Attired in legibly characteristic dress, the Chinese diplomatic mission, headed by ‘the mandarin Ping’, stand on the left of the scene, facing a cabinet of sorted post, listening intently to one of their French hosts. To the right of the scene, a postal worker heaves a heavy sack of post as he heads out of the frame; the work of the post continues apace despite the diplomatic formalities occurring around it. The caption boasts that even the Chinese, often regarded as ‘modern Egyptians, superior inventors’, are ‘amazed at the rapidity and exactitude of our postal system’: a system in which one can send a letter from Paris to Peking in only forty days, and pay only 80 centimes.24 Of all the wonders of the modern world, it was the routine efficiency of the postal service that the French had decided to demonstrate to and impress upon their visitors. Overtones of Western racial superiority and imperial ambition – successes in the Second Opium War and Taiping Rebellion were a recent memory; 1866 would see French forces retaliate for the murder of Catholic missionaries in Korea, and begin an exploration of the Mekong river – encode within the image, which at first sight

Figure 4.1  M. de Crauzat, Visite de la Mission chinoise à l’Hôtel des Postes, (Le Monde Illustré, 26 May 1866), 1866. Musée de La Poste, Paris, Inv. 2009.191.10. © Collections musée de La Poste, Paris / La Poste

 Philatelic Impressionism 83 appears to be a straightforward document of a mundane diplomatic visit to an even more mundane post office, traces of the fundamental ideological interconnections that existed between the post and other, increasingly global, systems of administration, power and control. At the Exposition Universelle of the following year, the Champ de Mars played host to a bureau de poste, which showcased the activity of the French postal service to the Exposition’s eleven million visitors.25 This bureau was illustrated in the 27 October 1866 edition of Le Monde Illustré where it was accompanied by an exhibition of stamps and galvanoplates by Anatole Hulot.26 Perhaps inspired by this display of postal magnificence, Maxime du Camp devoted the very first chapter of the first volume of his monumental and encyclopaedic record of daily life in Paris, Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde motié du XIXe siècle, written in six volumes between 1867 and 1874, to the operation of the postal service.27 Du Camp charts the rapid development of the French postal service – citing the meteoric increase in post offices, number of objects processed, postmen employed and income generated from the sale of stamps – before examining, in precise detail, a typical day of its operation in Paris.28 At numerous points in his lengthy description du Camp is almost overcome with the complexity of the entire system, with its sometimes-frenetic rhythm, its speedy efficiency, and competent and dedicated workers. It seems to have been for du Camp a great point of pride that the postal service is just that, a service, not constructed to generate revenue. (The substantial sums raised from the sale of stamps seem incidental here.) In the fulfilment of this mission, no expense is spared in uniting poorly or misaddressed letters with their intended recipients. Du Camp notes how letters addressed in Arabic, Russian or Greek would be sent to the appropriate embassy for translation; certain postal employees, known as ‘déchiffreurs’ (decoders), existed exclusively to decrypt semi-legible handwriting or minimally addressed envelopes. Du Camp rather playfully tested this mechanism, himself posting a letter addressed only ‘A l’auteur de madame Bovary’, noting with pleasure that it was indeed received by his friend Flaubert the following day.29 Beyond the spectacle of the Exposition Universelle, or the magnificence of the Hôtel des Postes, which du Camp describes as ‘a vast monument’, the overriding impression of du Camp’s account is the almost incomprehensible scale of the bureaucratic machine that operates almost unseen behind the boîte aux lettres, tabacs selling stamps, postmen or bureaux de poste, that is to say, the performative and material interface between the citizenry and the post.30 The efficient and effective postal machine, which daily demonstrated the capacity and glory of the Empire, was inherited largely unchanged by the government of the Third Republic. Defeat against Prussia, the Siege of Paris and the Commune presented the postal service with multiple hardships, stimulated innovations and solidified the status of the post as an essential public service. Having abandoned the throne, Napoléon III found his effigy erased from French stamps; in Paris, old republican plates showing the head of Cérès were used to print perforated stamps, whereas, in the provinces, as the supply of Napoléon III stamps was running low, arrangements were made to print stamps lithographically in Bordeaux.31 The Bordeaux Issue, printed between 5 November 1870 and 4 March 1871, now particularly valued

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by stamp collectors, likewise returned Cérès to French stamps. The availability of stamps, however, was least among the hard practicalities of life under siege faced by those Parisians who wanted to make contact with provincial friends and family. In order to circumvent the Prussian forces, numerous schemes were devised to facilitate communication, including pigeon post, hot-air balloon delivery and boules de moulin. In the first instance, photographic technologies were used to miniaturize letters to be stored in their thousands on film carried by pigeon.32 Stamps were used only in the case of balloon post, sometimes overprinted with phrases such as ‘par ballon’ or ‘B. BALLON. P. E.’ in order to indicate the higher price commanded by the feat (in other instances, printed envelopes or special postcards would also be used). One such example, a 2 centime Cérès series stamp overprinted with ‘B. BALLON. P. E.’ exists on Sheet 32 of the French section of the Tapling Collection, which may have come from the Caillebotte collection (Figure 3.5). One of the first actions of the new Third Republican government was to institutionalize the reintroduction of Cérès, making only slight technical changes to the old Second Republic designs which had been pressed into emergency service.33 The aberration of the Second Empire was thus erased. By 1876, with the Republic established, a new stamp design – more beautiful, modern, legible and cheaper to produce – was desired by the government; an open competition was held to solicit designs that were to be judged by a panel which included the engraver Louis Pierre Henriquel-Dupont, the architect Théodore Ballu and the painters Jean-Louis Meissonier and Paul-JacquesAimé Baudry.34 That such eminent artists were entrusted in selecting the design, and that they ran a concours – an open competition format typically used to commission designs for the architecture and decoration of public buildings and spaces – indicates both how stamp design nestled under the umbrella of state arts policy and its perceived political significance. The winning Type Sage stamps were issued in 1876, replacing the Cérès stamps, and would remain current until 1900. They depict allegories of Commerce and Peace clasping hands and ruling over the world by means of the post – certainly an apt, if wishful, analogy. The period following the introduction of the Type Sage stamps, however positive the message of its design, was marred by a ‘proletarianization of the staff of the PTT [Postes, télégraphes et téléphones]’: longer hours, lower pay, mediocre infrastructure, a slowing of modernization and failed trials of automation and mechanization.35 These conditions would ultimately lead to multiple major strikes early in the next century. Starting in 1830, the postal administration, centralized in Paris, unleashed upon the countryside a veritable army of rural postmen, uniformed and badged; of the 30,000 employees of the post in 1875, 19,000 were facteurs ruraux.36 The rural postman became an icon of the homogenizing thrust of the centralized French state: postmen were comparable in this mission to teachers, not only indexing the expansion of centralized bureaucratic administration but also helping forge a cohesive national identity out of shared experiences of shared institutions.37 In his 1869 book of songs for children Laurent Delcasso described ‘Le facteur rural’, wandering the French countryside in his blue uniform and Képi, as a discrete, dutiful and trustworthy custodian of everyone’s correspondence, newspapers and money, capable of a civilized conversation with rich

 Philatelic Impressionism 85 and poor alike.38 Such a positive image of the rural postman as a useful and unifying figure in the lives of country-folk became widespread throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. The ideological capacity of the postal service itself, beyond its role as a distributor of the propagandist iconography imprinted upon the stamps themselves, thus extended to the ways in which it managed to posit a shared relation with a functionary of the state as the basis for a universal French identity. This function, as perhaps the inclusion of a song about the rural postman in a book aimed at children indicates, drew the post into the orbit of the state’s pedagogic mission. In the Second Empire, as du Camp noted, shocked at the ubiquity of errors made by the poor in addressing their letters, the Administration of the Post in conjunction with the Minister of Public Instruction distributed among the nation’s primary schools 70,000 ‘model writing notebooks which contained, as examples, letters addressed correctly and regularly’.39 Such top-down changes were matched by an increasingly powerful discourse from within the philatelic community, which accelerated in the Third Republic and reached its zenith towards the end of the century, which attempted to cast stamp collecting as a wholesome and politically useful pursuit. Such writers tended to argue that stamp collecting could function as an educational instrument, articulating the ways in which it matched the official pedagogy and epistemology of the bourgeois republican state. Charles Joliet, writing in the Journal de la Jeunesse (a weekly illustrated journal for children aged ten to fifteen) in 1881, first introduced his young readers to postage stamps as ‘Microscopic Curiosities’, marvelling at the technical achievements of miniature representation.40 A decade hence, the journal published a comprehensive guide to stamps.41 ‘The collection of stamps’, Lucien d’Elne wrote in 1891, ‘may become a truly educational instrument’.42 Elne conceived of stamp collecting as a kind of investigatory game, one that would strengthen imagination and observational precision and connect the young collector to the material world at large.43 The chronology of Caillebotte’s stamp collecting practice, from 1876 to 1887, thus meant that he was active at the moment at which the philatelic discourse stressing its normative educational and ideological function was making itself more apparent. In his articulation of stamps as ‘excellent “object lessons”’ Elne deliberately and strategically adopted the language of official Republican pedagogy in order to make his case.44 The official pedagogy of the Third Republic drew from the eclectic philosophy of Victor Cousin, which affirmed a priori the unity of self, and set about cultivating a transformative inner life by an appeal to the senses. The basic unit of what became known as the méthode intuitive was the object lesson, or leçon de choses, whereby sensory contact with objects was the means by which abstract ideas were approached: as one teacher quoted by Patricia Tilburg noted, ‘instruction by words [gave way to] instruction by the eyes’.45 Consequently, classrooms were stocked with maps and artworks, children were encouraged to take countryside walks as dynamic object lessons and drawing classes became an integral part of the national curriculum. In theory, if not necessarily always in practice, this visual material was utilized to develop the observational skills of the students.46 Once developed, these skills would be turned inwards by the students, producing knowledge of their own intimate psychological and moral workings. This self-knowledge would ensure a virile and secular inner life, the

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basis of a national restoration. Individual judgement and imaginative creativity were thus not the end-goals of the object lessons as institutionalized by the Third Republic, but were rather intermediary steps in the development of a specifically Republican moral soul.47 Stamps, and especially stamp albums, were, as it was argued, uniquely well positioned to form the basis of an ‘object lesson’ in the manner of the méthode intuitive. Their status as both image and object put Republican aesthetics into contact with the materialist positivism of their political philosophy. The study of stamps required the young philatelist to practice a desirably holistic interdisciplinarity avant la lettre: each stamp, depending on its manufacture, design or origin, could provide a miniature lesson in geography, history, aesthetics, politics, language, ethnography, botany or even astronomy. Moreover, the practice of collecting itself was thought to promote healthy mental habits, including discipline, order and imagination. The album, when properly and coherently organized, would allow its owner to collect and collate the material fragments of a distant exterior universe, serializing them to produce knowledge. The notion that stamp collecting could be a normative and wholesome educational activity depended on its association with childhood. What Elne described as timbromanie crossed the channel following the introduction of the British Penny Black in 1840, reaching a fever pitch as early as the 1860s, and it was in these early years that stamp collecting first came to be thought of as a schoolboy’s pursuit.48 Women and girls featured prominently among the earliest stamp collectors, typically prizing them as decorative objects; however, they were rapidly excluded by a bourgeois masculine colonization of philately and its transformation from a purely aesthetic into a more market-driven pastime.49 A large proportion of the philatelic paraphernalia of the period was produced specifically for children, to accommodate their more modest budget and limited expertise. One notable example of this was stamp albums with preprinted labelling and organization; all that was left for the junior philatelist to do was to attach the correct stamp to the correct spot in a kind of philatelic paint-by-numbers.50 The Sunday stamp market on the Champs-Elysée, described by Louis Clodion as ‘la bourse à Lilliput’, was a less formal and cheaper philatelic market, dominated by teenage boys.51 As we have seen, Republican pedagogy was based on the eclectic philosophy of Victor Cousin, who held as central the general principle that ‘Character is Unity’.52 This drive for the unity of mind and body was part of a wider effort to reinvigorate and Republicanize French society. The practical problems of governance were tinged with this central concern to make a cohesive society out of its individual members, combining an appeal to universal principles of democracy and equality with the reality of masculine and bourgeois dominance, a conundrum Robert Kaplan characterized as the ‘problem of the many and the few’.53 The turbulence caused by a succession of political and economic scandals, as well as variably vociferous competition from conservative and leftist oppositions, contributed a very real sense of danger and urgency to such potentially abstract-seeming questions.54 Fear of social collapse and the concomitant desire for order was thus a salient shared experience in the late nineteenth century.55 The desire to avoid the threat of sociopolitical fragmentation by

 Philatelic Impressionism 87 creating a cohesive and inclusive social structure united around a knot of Republican positivist values was the central concern at the start of the Third Republic. It permeated every facet of Republican discourse and governance, including the writing of history and the creation of secular, universal education.56 The crucial and highly ideological sleight of hand that takes place in the stamp album is that, in bringing together these material fragments of an exterior world, the serialized order and organization of these image–object fragments supposedly emerges naturally from their very materiality; that is, there is a correct order in which the collection, taken as a whole, speaks to the truth of their extrinsic reality, the tokens of which it curates. However, of course, the knowledge produced by the collection qua ordered series of signifiers is a narrative matrix of signification that indexes first and foremost the truth of its principles of organization. Philately, as a field of knowledge production, was embedded in a materialist ontology whose influence was felt across pedagogic, political and historical discourses; this ontology was in turn mobilized in the ideology of the Third Republic in service of producing the French nation as both a natural fact and an organic whole. Postage stamps were intimately bound up in the very same processes of modernizing change by which Paris (as well as the material fortunes of the Caillebotte family) had been transformed, and in the processes by which Caillebotte worked to make sense of his place in it. There were, as we have seen, multiple nodes to this connection: from the genesis of the design of their imagery in the context of official state iconography to their status as quotidian and ubiquitous components of a shared visual-cultural landscape and language; to their oscillation between currency and commodity; to their status as an official document facilitating a certain performative relationship between citizens and the state; to their utility as an object within (and symbol of) those bureaucratic and administrative apparatus of the post so often represented as a spectacle of modern and statist efficiency; and finally their life as units in a collection, the image ground of a reflexive ideological process of serial ordering. It was thus no coincidence that Caillebotte, confronted by a subject full of personal and political import, would lean on philatelic forms of visual meaning production. Caillebotte’s relation to the Republican politics of Parisian space in the post-Commune moment, a question raised forcefully by Albert Boime, can be reconceptualized by a focus on the philatelic language in which Caillebotte articulated it.57 Peter Galassi’s formal deconstruction of Le Pont de l’Europe (Figure 3.1) highlights the highly artificial and complex means through which Caillebotte constructed the space of the painting, wrestling with multiple planes of vision and perspectival convergences.58 Galassi argues that Caillebotte painted this image with the aid of photographic equipment and Renaissance theories of perspective, drawing from them their mathematical infallibility and scientific accuracy, yet deliberately misusing both in order to make strange the geometrical objectivity they offered him. Caillebotte positions the viewer on the bridge, directly before a complex and ambiguous narrative scene. A dog skips out from the bottom of the frame, drawing the eye of the viewer up along the length of the bridge, passing a worker in a bleu (smock) who stares in absorptive closure through the imposing metal trellis of the bridge onto the railway

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lines of the Gare St. Lazare. Behind the man’s back walks a woman, dressed fashionably in black and covered by a parasol, who has clearly caught the attention of a bourgeois gentleman stroller (Caillebotte himself), who, as he passes her, turns as if to engage her in conversation. Caillebotte’s tight, naturalistic finish and careful attention to detail make a convincing case to be read as reality; indeed, if viewed with the glancing attention of a flâneur, the scene takes on the frozen temporality of a snapshot of daily life congealed into pictorial form. The figural units are all clearly delineated and arranged around each other in pictorial space in such a way as to invite comparison without the risk of convergence. Yet, upon a closer and more extended inspection the artificial framework that holds together this snapshot-illusion becomes apparent. The plunging perspective and complex relationship between the recession of the pavement (set at an incline away from the viewer) and the trelliswork of the bridge (horizontal from the perspective of the viewer) required Caillebotte to include two vanishing points. Two separate studies of the bridge’s architecture in perspective each feature two off-centre vanishing points: one relating to the pavement and railing, the other to the trelliswork. Yet, Caillebotte offsets this ostensibly naturalist verism by distorting spaces and objects. In the final painting, Caillebotte disguises the area where the fact of his having used two vanishing points would have been clearest behind his bourgeois gentleman stroller and wisps of rising steam, such that the key to understanding the complex organization of space is concealed from the viewer. In this way, Caillebotte makes uncanny his ostensible fidelity to the reality of the scene. Other distortions include a widening of the pavement in the foreground to make its plunging recession even more dramatic, and the flattening and stretching of the background buildings, from a true-to-life slant to the perpendicular order of the final canvas. This is not just idle tinkering, but rather part of a wider bifurcation of the entire visual substructure of the painting; Le Pont de l’Europe is constructed through two planes of projection: one centring on the bourgeois, the other on the worker.59 Caillebotte’s distortion of the distant buildings to make them run parallel to the top of the canvas creates a projection plane parallel to the picture surface whose centre of vision is the off-centre vanishing point of the trellis, centred on the top-hatted bourgeois. However, the ‘X’ in the ironwork of the bridge through which the absorbed worker stares is too high and wide to conform to this proposed perpendicular projection plane. An oil study, centred on this same section of the bridge, matches exactly the projection of the overlarge ‘X’ in the final image, offering an internally coherent perceptual fragment that appears anomalous only when inserted into an alien perspectival structure. Since this ‘X’ matches the shape demanded by the rest of the trelliswork – that is, it is drawn from the same vanishing point – but not the size, it would demand a much shallower recession into pictorial space from the rest of the bridge than is indeed the case. Centred on the worker, the projection plane within which this distortion makes sense (its insistent presence across multiple studies indicates clearly that its inclusion in the final canvas was intentional) cuts across the flatness produced by the forward-facing buildings. Consequently, this doubling of planes implies two separate centres of vision, and thus, paradoxically and impossibly,

 Philatelic Impressionism 89 that the viewer is looking in two directions at once.60 Formally, then, Caillebotte has fractured this carefully observed scene into multiple fragmentary viewpoints, resisting the universalizing and totalizing instantaneity of the camera snapshot by encoding the multiple possibilities of embodied looking (the paradoxes of a mélange of halfremembered experiences of the same scene over time; the mutation of a scene before one’s eye as you move through and around it). Caillebotte has serialized space itself. The two projection places just described are connected by a third, intermediary plane, which bends space in such a way as to smooth the transition. Juxtaposed and connected, in this way, the three projection planes thus form a series; Caillebotte articulates and elucidates the complex space of Le Pont de l’Europe (or rather, a certain idea of the complex space of Le Pont de l’Europe) by drawing (and then drawing from) multiple distinct but related really existing variants, ordering them into a series whose terms form a logical progression and whose seriality holistically conjures the signified term without necessarily signifying it directly. Compare the way in which sheets in the Tapling Collection, for example France Sheet 36 (Figure 2.2), signify a prototypical design, in this case type III of the 1870–1 Bordeaux Issue 20c blue Cérès, by ordering and displaying multiple variations, none of which individually is capable of signifying the ideal design (all have some aberration, flaw or deviation; in the case of Sheet 36 the salient element is the position of the head of Cérès relative to the pearled circle). The original idea is thus signified by the multiplication of examples of its distortion. Caillebotte’s practice of deconstructing, distorting and serializing space thus closely resembles the significatory language of the stamp album. Exactly as with his philatelic practice, the key to understanding Caillebotte’s Pont de l’Europe is understanding its distortions. This doubling and hybridization of the spatial fabric of the painting encodes an analogous narrative duality. Each configuration of space is oriented around and anchored by an explicit signifier of class, a top-hatted bourgeois and a smock-clad worker. Just as the overall specular space is produced by a process of fracture and recombination, multiplication and synthesis, so too is the temporality of these spaces and the implied temporality of how we view these spaces. We experience the uneasy duality of, on the one hand, the extended and absorbed looking of the worker, the careful attention and visual studying that correlates to the work of Caillebotte-thepainter and, on the other hand, the quick and furtive glancing of Caillebotte-theflâneur, a modern and quasi-photographic instantaneity that begs to be read as real. However, unlike the architectural and perspectival substructure to the painting, which Caillebotte skilfully and covertly bends and blends to suit his own needs, and indeed unlike Béraud’s street scenes, the figures refuse to integrate or interact. The social drama playing out on Le Pont de l’Europe is one that articulates a complete dearth of meaningful interaction, populated as it is by characters who move in two temporal worlds connected only by the impossibility of their ever meeting. In contrast to Le Pont de l’Europe, Rue de Paris; temps de pluie (Plate 2) is not constructed through the serial unification of distinct but similar views of a singular scene, which in the course of its being experienced has fragmented and from which arise the non-converging recession lines, the doubled and hybrid vision plane centred

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upon the bourgeois and the worker, and the oscillation between an emphasis on surface and depth. Rather, Rue de Paris depends upon a strongly articulated orthogonal surface structure. Whereas Le Pont de l’Europe is primarily about the serialization of architectural and perspectival space itself, in Rue de Paris Caillebotte has concerned himself with the organization of bodies within space. The Parisian rue in question is actually the Carrefour de Moscou (now the Place de Dublin), which Caillebotte pictures as populated by a cast of umbrella-wielding, overcoat-sporting individuals of various social classes and occupations, ostensibly braving the titular rain, which is itself not pictured. The chief narrative element again centres upon a bourgeois couple (albeit one more securely attached together) strolling towards the viewer about to be passed by another umbrella carrying individual, seen from behind. Behind this couple is elaborated a veritable river of paving stones, which flows along from the left edge of the frame, pooling in the square in the centre of the canvas before splintering off into the tendrils of other rues. The dizzying plunge into perspectival depth articulated by the sharply recessing blocks of uniform Haussmannized apartment buildings is resisted by a comparably strong grid-like surface structure; the quadrisection of space produced by the intersection of the street lamp with the horizon creates a framework that flattens space along its axes. The prominence given to the slick paving stones, to which Caillebotte devoted a study in oil and gridded out in pencil, encodes into perspectival recession the very artificial architecture by which it was achieved, problematizing its apparent authenticity and further calling attention to the flatness of the support; Krauss remarks on the prevalence of the grid in perspectival manuals of the period (Figure 4.2).61 The figures and figure groups in the finished canvas retain the stripped back and rigid verticality of this early study and are pulled up flush to the picture surface, their frozen stiffness contrasting with the more dynamic Parisians, who slip, slide, sweep and skid their way across the rain-slick street in Béraud’s c. 1880 take on the theme in Le boulevard Poissonière sous la pluie.62 This gridded, flattened – philatelic – surface is populated by discrete and distinct visual units, crisply delineated from each other and from the space around them by Caillebotte’s careful and tight brushwork; their sartorial uniformity nevertheless introduces dynamics of multiplication, repetition and serialization. The homogenizing prevalence of the same black coats and the same slate-grey umbrellas not only casts the figures Caillebotte paints as variations on a theme but also fragments them. With the monochromatic black suits and coats so successfully veiling the body, all that remains visible to the viewer are their quasi-disembodied heads and hands. Thus, what Caillebotte produces, as if a page drawn directly from the Tapling Collection – compare to France Sheet 8 of the Tapling Collection (Plate 4) – is an iterative series of head-fragments arranged according to a priori conceptual principles (in this case, as Peter Galassi has shown, principally the golden ratio) in a grid-like pattern on a flat surface.63 To what end? When the painting was exhibited in 1877, one of the most frequently aired grievances was that Caillebotte had forgotten to paint the rain; Roger Ballu and Victor Fournel felt especially short-changed by this oversight.64 However, umbrellas need

 Philatelic Impressionism 91

Figure 4.2  Gustave Caillebotte, Study for Rue de Paris; temps de pluie, 1877. 30.2 × 46.5 cm, Graphite, with touches of erasing and touches of charcoal, on tan, moderately thick, moderately textured handmade laid paper, 302 × 465 mm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, restricted gift of the Jentes Family Foundation, 2011.420. not index rain. Although the water-slick pavement and pavés offer a certain narrative justification for their presence, as Daniel J. Sherman has shown, umbrellas in the late nineteenth century became a ubiquitous symbol of bourgeois masculinity.65 An early study for Rue de Paris (Figure 4.3) depicts a young man, who does not seem to feature in the finished composition or other oil sketches and studies, walking towards the viewer, carrying an umbrella. He wears a stoic expression, as he battles through the ‘rain’, dressed in an overcoat and brimmed hat (notably, not the top hat of the more well-heeled figures to whom Caillebotte devotes most attention in the final work). The figure’s left hand dangles limply by his side, while in his right the figure grips the straight handle of his umbrella, unable to keep it exactly vertical: the torque it exerts plainly visible in the tension of the hand muscles. Caillebotte has used the space around the figure to make further studies of each hand, in varying poses and seen from slightly varying angles. The single study of the right hand shows it in a more relaxed state, with a looser grip on the shaft of the umbrella, and consequently the umbrella itself is drawn at a more obtuse angle relative to the figure. However, it is perhaps the three disembodied hands to the right of the figure, iteratively working through slight varieties in its form, which are most interesting. Their downward orientation, with the weight of heaviest shading collected at the bottom, implies a descending trajectory and almost gives them the implicit feel of water droplets bulging (dark) at the bottom and tapering (light) at the top.

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Figure 4.3  Gustave Caillebotte, Homme sous un parapluie, de face, avec études de mains, 1877. 62.0 × 48.2 cm, Black Chalk on Blue-Grey Paper. Private Collection © Comité Caillebotte, Paris. In preparing for a work that infamously featured rain only in its title, it is noteworthy that Caillebotte studies a character bracing against a downpour of hands. As discussed, across his oeuvre Caillebotte became fixated on the capacity of the hand to visualize the performance of class and the effect of work on the body. Here Caillebotte was interested in the manual manipulation of a tool as a locus of classed performativity, just as was in articulating the umbrella as the tool of the bourgeois gentleman. The motif of the hand is thus mapped onto the absent master-signifier of the painting. It is only the concept of rain in the painting that makes everything comprehensible, explaining the prevalence of umbrellas, the appearance of space, colour and light and the behaviour of the figures; the symbolic network of the painting, its structure of meaning, thus hinges upon this absent centre. Where the serially iterative repetition of head-fragments across the surface of the canvas articulates the influence of philatelic modes of organizing visual elements, it is the same repetition of the hand-fragments, the motif of the manual manipulation of an object explicitly classed as bourgeois, that enunciates the symbolic content of the painting. The motif of the manual manipulation of classed (and classing) implements was likewise the crucial symbolic moment in the third of Caillebotte’s major 1877-exhibited street scenes, Les Peintres en bâtiment (Figure 3.2). The painting puts the viewer in the position of a pavement-stroller, observing four men in white smocks caught in rapt contemplation of the signage of a shopfront they have been tasked to paint. The thin strip of pavement upon which they stand disappears into perspectival distance and marks the division of the canvas into three unequal segments: the pavement itself occupies the centre, the cobbled road and distant buildings take up the leftmost section and the row of buildings containing the one whose signs are being painted inhabits the right portion

 Philatelic Impressionism 93 of the canvas. The left section of the painting, which widens as it reaches its vanishing point, is populated by a lone figure dressed in black crossing the street, a stationary carriage in the far distance and the hint of another on the move. In contrast to this sense of sparseness, the buildings on the right loom up and tower above even those workers who stand atop ladders. The space reserved for the narrative action of the titular subjects of the painting, the pavement, is therefore compressed and liminal, defined by its edges. On a stage set caught between the two poles of Haussmann’s Paris, its widened boulevards and imposing terraces of homogenized apartment buildings, Caillebotte stages a public performance of work. Dressed in the white smocks appropriate for their position and task, surrounded by the tools of their trade (paintbrushes, ladders, perhaps notes or instructions), these men seem caught in ostensibly the same absorptive closure as the potentially seditious idler who daydreams on the Pont de l’Europe. However, the object of their attention is not the passing of trains as they arrive at and depart from the Gare St. Lazare, but rather the shopfront; this is the careful mental planning of future physical work, rather than an abrogation of work itself. Despite a number of pencil studies devoted to the toil and physical effort of the workers, which demonstrate a deep observational focus on the phenomenological and corporeal dimensions of his subjects, in the final canvas Caillebotte retreated to an earlier and altogether more ambiguous narrative moment in which the only work taking place (apart from the work of representation itself) is unrepresentably cerebral. These workers perform work only in so far as it classes them and no further. Beyond the foreman we see the back of a top-hatted bourgeois gentleman stroller as he walks away from us. The sharp recession of the pavement translates this spatial distance into a kind of vertical stacking, his black suit pressing against the white smock of the foreman, his top hat adjacent to the worker’s cap. The spatial organization of the scene enforces this stark juxtaposition of class actors, who share the same public spaces but nothing else. In this painting Caillebotte has thus taken steps to combine his desire to order and control space according to objective abstract principles with his keen eye for the disorienting drama of its distortion and exaggeration; the serialized multiplication of space developed in Le Pont de l’Europe is here combined with the iconic flatness of Rue de Paris. The perspectival structure and specific viewpoint contrive to articulate that anxious combination of proximity and mutual unintelligibility that dominated conceptions of the social and of public space in the mid-1870s. Caillebotte presents an ambiguous narrative of work and class in a public domain wherein the built environment’s propensity to impose certain relations between bodies is axiomatic and overriding. I am not arguing that Caillebotte slavishly applied philatelic techniques to painterly problems. For example, the norms of philatelic display demanded that each specimen be visible in its entirety, separated from those with which it was juxtaposed by a minimum of clear space. This side-by-side arrangement relied on the support acting as an exclusively two-dimensional field, visually as well as materially. Thus, the direct application of this arrangement to painting would have endangered the quasinaturalistic and quasi-illusionistic three-dimensional space, and disrupted the dynamic oscillations between flatness and depth, that Caillebotte had so carefully cultivated. Indeed, Caillebotte’s figures sometimes stack and overlap in ways that would have been anathema to the purist stamp collector. However, Caillebotte is careful to ensure that

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this overlapping does not disturb the carefully delineated individuality of his figures; he confines each figure (or in the case of the central couple walking arm-in-arm in Rue de Paris, figure group) to its own plane in perspectival space, emphasizing by means of space and scale the distance that separates them, and ensuring that even where they overlap they do not merge. Caillebotte is therefore able to undertake the partial overlapping of figures that is necessary if his scene is to index the reality of the street without endangering their discrete individuality and the primacy of their arrangement. Thus, Caillebotte ingeniously utilized the very characteristic of his painting that would seem to have been incompatible with his philatelic project, the requirement for quasiillusionistic space, as the catalyst for producing their compatibility. Moreover, Caillebotte is able to leverage this solution for symbolic effect. An early esquisse for Les Peintres en bâtiment (Figure 4.4) reveals that Caillebotte had, at one point, intended for the bourgeois man seen behind the foreground housepainter to be positioned slightly further away, walking towards the viewer, and accompanied by a mass of black pigment that can be read as a child or a coat. When compared to the finished canvas, the relation between the bourgeois and the worker in the esquisse is less clear, and their juxtaposition less forceful, weakened by the increased discrepancy of scale and the presence of a third party. By bringing the bourgeois closer in and turning him away, Caillebotte returns focus to the side-by-side juxtaposition of headdress and the overlapping stacking of smock over suit. Caillebotte’s examination of the strange combination of physical proximity and psychological distance is therefore actualized in

Figure 4.4  Gustave Caillebotte, Esquisse for Les Peintres en bâtiment, 1877. 60 × 73 cm, Oil on Canvas. Private Collection.

 Philatelic Impressionism 95 the doubling of juxtapositions that characterized this complex admixture of philatelic and painterly labours. In this painting–collecting nexus, fused on the surface of the canvas, symbolic meaning is produced on the level of discrete image-fragments and their spatial and conceptual relations. Caillebotte’s umbrella-sporting and paintbrush-wielding figures gesture towards the object-driven public performance of class; the complex perspectival spaces produced by the Haussmannized boulevards and bridges of Paris become the backdrop for the spectacle of this performativity, the arena in which the constituent components of the social organism are put into a recognizable order. Their lack of interaction foregrounds the anonymizing, homogenizing and dislocating consequences of life in the modern city, the threat of class mixing and the need for social harmony. However, this symbolic matrix results only in frustrations and paradoxes: in highly complex spaces that don’t make sense, in figures that, when taken alone are paradoxical (umbrellas for non-existent rain), and when taken together offer only scant scraps of narrative (what precisely is the relation between the central couple on the Pont de l’Europe?). This problematization of symbolic narrative marks Caillebotte’s departure from the more normative photographic Naturalism practised by painters like Jean Béraud, who suffused their paintings with small circuits of anecdotal detail which satisfy desire for meaning and draw attention away from the intrinsic artificiality of the painting. It is the abstract principles of organization, the mathematical order of grids and golden ratios, the neat quadrisection of space, that reveal most clearly the basis of Caillebotte’s practice. Claude Ghez notes that the worker leaning against the balustrade on Le Pont de l’Europe is lit inversely to the rest of the canvas: his back is more luminous than his front, where the shadow pattern of the rest of the scene would imply the reverse.66 Ghez argues that Caillebotte uses this to emphasize the working man’s distance from the narrative action, the extent to which he is caught in absorbed reverie. Indeed, it certainly dramatizes the lack, even impossibility, of social interaction within the frame of the painting. Gabriel Weisberg likewise focuses on the isolated quality of Caillebotte’s figures, their failure to interact with each other, or with their environment.67 Like Ghez, Weisberg cites this as evidence for the narrative of urban ennui and dislocation that Caillebotte is trying to communicate. This out-of-place quality to Caillebotte’s figures in both Rue de Paris and Le Pont de l’Europe – that they seem to exist independently of each other and their surroundings – is not simply a narrative ploy, but rather another symptom of Caillebotte’s cross-pollinations of philately and painting that I have been calling his philatelic impressionism. After having selected a site and worked out how to convey its complex three-dimensionality on the flat canvas, perhaps with the aid of photographic or optical devices, Caillebotte staked it out, perhaps (like his friends Béraud and Giuseppe de Nittis) in a carriage, collecting his observations of the passers-by as sketches (Figure 4.2).68 Caillebotte then selected from among his figure studies, arranging them in the space according to abstract mathematical principles of organization, before eventually fixing these relations in pencil and oil.69 In this respect, the canvas surface acts as the space of a collection, a locus of ordering wherein tokens of an extrinsic material reality are disciplined by abstract principles into a spatial and conceptual matrix which produces narrative meaning.

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The illuminated back of the worker reveals the fact of his superimposition: the fact of his abstraction and extraction from the ‘authentic’ reality signified by the precise finish and naturalistic detail. The bodily instability of figures caught in mid-stride echoes the photographic snapshot effect typical of the dominant naturalism of the Third Republic, the potentially disrupting speed of the camera’s vision. Yet, the strong sense of delineation of the figures from their surrounds, the lack of interaction between the figures and the space and the overall appeal to flatness (especially with the case of Rue de Paris) undermines any attempt to experience the painting as a photograph of a singular reality (however uncanny). The dynamic tension between flatness and precise detail is symptomatic of Caillebotte’s philatelic visuality and methodology qua production of order, but signified precisely its inverse, class antagonism, social discord and resistance to order. Albert Boime notes how the rain-slick paving stones offer a powerful metaphor for cleansing and encode within Rue de Paris the normative Republican politics of recovering and restoring the public spaces of Paris: a cleansing of the built environment indexing a concomitant sociopolitical cleansing of dangerous radicals.70 Caillebotte’s ordered and orderly canvas restores the order of a temporal ‘before’; as T. J. Clark famously argues, the Haussmannized built environment was part of an ideological attempt to effect social closure and unity by spectacularizing its shared spaces, ensuring that Paris was only comprehensible as a totalized and discrete image within the remit of which the Republic’s preferred configuration of the social was given form.71 We have likewise seen how stamp design, the postal service and philately were all implicated in the Third Republic’s ideological production of societal order and a hegemonic uniformity of identity. The post was one of the many institutions that, in its efficient and daily connecting of all the arrondissements of Paris (with each other, the rest of France and the world), stitched the city together, suturing the social, weaving a fabric of shared identity by acting as a common (often vanishing) mediator in the communicative lives of French citizens. Likewise stamp design was an integral component of the state’s attempts to promulgate normative visual-cultural forms, going hand-in-hand with draconian censorship which policed the fringes of the visible.72 Philately was conceptualized as a powerful pedagogic tool by which bourgeois habits and a unitary Republican soul would be internalized by schoolchildren. Thus, the philatelic visuality of Caillebotte’s paintings of Haussmanized Paris actualizes the normative ideological call to order in a language always already inextricably bound up in the institutions making that call. The central couple in Rue de Paris (Plate 2), who walk arm-in-arm towards the viewer, may well make this connection explicit by quoting from the enchained Republican couple featured on the then-recently issued Type Sage stamps. On the new Republican stamps, allegories of peace (left) and commerce (right) stand upright, leaning slightly on the globe that separates them, and holding hands before it (Figure 4.5). The overriding impression of the design is one of rectilinear forms (the rectangular frame and interior detailing around the text, the vertical upper torsos of the figures and the right angle of their straightened arms and conjoined hands) accented by curvilinear passages (the curvature of the globe and the sinuosity of the figures’ legs). So too do

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Figure 4.5  Jules-Auguste Sage, 15 centime, Type II, ‘Type Sage’ or ‘Peace and Commerce’ series, blue, 1877–8. Typographic Postage Stamp. the bodies of Caillebotte’s physically connected couple articulate a rigid linearity that contrasts with the globular curve of the umbrella. Under the auspices of allegory, JulesAuguste Sage articulates a paradigmatically and heretonormatively beautiful couple whose physical touch connects their natural union with the valorization of global postal intercourse. Although he replaces the attributes of allegory with the paraphernalia of his contemporary moment, in quoting the design of the most current stamp in this painting, Caillebotte thus re-enacts the philatelist’s acquisition of a new specimen by inserting the visual motif into the orthogonal and iterative space of the collection. Moreover, Caillebotte’s inclusion of a motif that visualized so clearly an interface between some of the different strands of the Republic’s ideological call to order – the post, the heterosexual dyad, ideal beauty, physical vitality and virility, global conquest and technological progress – indicates his commitment to exploring the ideological coordinates of his present moment by philatelic means. Where for Krauss and Dyer the modernist grid (or serially iterative practice) signified a radical newness, for Caillebotte this task was already fulfilled by his subject. Haussmannized Paris was an icon of the new, as dangerous as it was reassuring; in 1877 to represent the radical newness imposed upon the city of Paris by Haussmann was also, however indirectly or negatively, to represent the similarly new, but altogether more radical, arrangement of the social which had taken shape within it during the Commune. Caillebotte’s orthogonal and serially repetitive form was thus not a manifesto of artistic inventiveness, innovation or originality but rather a strategy of containment, a way of navigating the potentially problematical consequences of unabashed newness bound up in a temporal separation of ‘past’ from ‘present’.

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However, as we have seen, the symbolic content of these paintings resists the formal processes of ordering by adopting configurations which confound sense. In the stamp album, utilizing these very same processes of meaning production and sharing key elements of a visual morphology, Caillebotte was successful in (or, perhaps, failed to avoid) articulating a legible teleological, materialist, historical metanarrative which perfectly matched prevailing ideologies of historical knowledge and the positivist epistemological zeitgeist; yet, his 1877 paintings foreground ambiguity, ambivalence, alienation, isolation and atomization.73 This tension between form and content, between order and resistance to order, is thus particularly revealing about Caillebotte’s relation to the central ideological problems of the 1870s and to the changed and changing consequences of the class of which he was part and of the work he did. Caillebotte’s brief flirtation with painting philatelically condensed both the radical resignificatory potentiality of work (work’s power to remake the worker) and the ossifying ideological imperative towards totalized and uniform order. It thus offered Caillebotte a readily available style and set of symbolic apparatuses with which he could, in the liminal historical moment between Moral Order and Opportunist Republicanism, under the shadow of Communard resistance to Imperial order, attempt to conceptualize his relation to both. Caillebotte’s philatelic impressionism thus did not mark a complete rupture with the hegemonic visuality of his moment (routinely described as ‘photographic’). Rather, it was the product of a subtle interjection of the philatelic visuality of the stamp album that remained alive to the medium-specific requirements of painting and the ideological power of the ‘photographic’ to constitute a reality effect. Indeed, if we follow the logic of Caillebotte’s preparatory studies – which distinguished the space from the people and constructed them in different ways – and accept the possibility that he may have used photographic or optical apparatuses, the philatelic emerged quite literally as an irruption, effective only after the individual components of stage and cast had been elucidated. Indeed, as Gloria Groom and Kelly Keegen note, ‘when Caillebotte created Paris Street, however, photography was still incapable of giving us what his painting does.’74 The flattened orthogonality, oscillation between detail and effect, application of a priori compositional parameters and serially iterative narrative structure – differently manifest in each of Rue de Paris; temps de pluie (Plate 2), Le Pont de L’Europe (Figure 3.1) and Les Peintres en bâtiment (Figure 3.2) – applied pressure to the assumptions inculcated in Caillebotte’s audience by the dominance of photographic Naturalism (of instantaneity, objectivity, authorlessness, logocentric narrative clarity) and activated by the photographic character these paintings possess when viewed with a passing glance. Galassi and Varnedoe’s influential reading of Caillebotte as being a photographic painter actually turns on the assumption of Caillebotte’s deliberate abandonment of the terms of the photographic visuality of his age. In consciously intervening to deform and control objective visual reality, to bend it to his subjective, authorial will, and then concealing the ‘deliberately abnormal’ result behind the superficial acuity of photopainting in the manner of Jean Béraud, this Caillebotte has necessarily abandoned the underlying ideological postulates of the photographic as an aesthetic category in

 Philatelic Impressionism 99 the late nineteenth century.75 In contrast to this understanding, I have attempted to emphasize that Caillebotte was working from within the dominant aesthetic ideology of his moment, and, by introducing new information and reframing the discussion to draw out the ways in which Caillebotte visually parsed and worked through his subjective relation to his social context, sought to understand the precise, philatelic, terms in which Caillebotte’s ‘mind obsessed with control’ actually functioned.76 Epiphenomena of the same underlying structure of modernity that concentrated power and visibility – that fetishized order, abhorred both lack and surplus and produced Haussmannized Paris – the parallel practices of photography and philately thus shared procedures and systems for visualizing the world and ascribing it meaning. Making these collateral lines converge, exposing moments of mutual incompatibility on the canvas surface, was the means by which Caillebotte was able to create the discursive space, the breathing room, necessary for the psychic succour of collecting (as a screen against trauma and antagonism) to take effect. Given that these subtle and incomplete departures from the procedures of ‘photo-painting’ had a highly individuated psychological origin and function (not even necessarily available in the terms I have set out to Caillebotte himself), and given the general ignorance of the fact or the importance of Caillebotte’s philatelic praxis, it should therefore not be surprising that neither contemporaneous critics nor contemporary art historians have identified the specifically philatelic character of Caillebotte’s idiosyncratic, defensive, deviations. Caillebotte’s break with philately came in 1887: dismayed at the end of fraternal cohabitation signalled by Martial’s marriage to Marie Minoret, Caillebotte auctioned off his choicest specimens, sold the rest to Thomas Keay Tapling and severed his ties with the philatelic community (the locus of his sociability shifted from philately to yachting, as it did from Paris to Petit Gennevilliers). His experimentation with painting philatelically, however, ended much sooner. Caillebotte’s contributions to the very next Impressionist exhibition in 1879 revealed the artist to have shifted his attention away from a sustained serial critique of Parisian public spaces and towards time spent boating on the Yerres – as in his triptych of panneaux décoratifs: Pêche à la ligne, Baigneurs, bords de l’Yerres, and Périssoires sur l’Yerres (Figure 1.6) – or painting the portraits of his friends and family – Portrait d’Eugène Daufresne, lisant, Portrait de Richard Gallo. In 1880 and 1882 his focus likewise remained squarely on the bourgeois domestic interior – La Partie de bésigue (Plate 6) – portraits of those in his social circle – Portrait de Richard Gallo – and the Norman coast – Marine, régates à Villers. In these years, when he did represent the city of Paris, it was through a device (which came to be characteristic of him) of the city seen from above, sometimes through a window. Paintings such as Vue de toits (Effet de neige) and La Rue Halévy, vue du sixième étage, exhibited in 1879, and Homme au balcon, boulevard Haussmann, exhibited in 1882, dramatize the evolution of Caillebotte’s vision of Paris away from those we have been describing under the heading of philatelic impressionism. Rodolphe Rapetti and Cardine Mathieu remind us that Caillebotte’s paintings of Paris seen from a balcony or through a window, although small in number, are radically unique and indicative of Caillebotte’s preoccupation with compositional problems.77 They reveal Paris to be just another interior, a city deserted and ‘drained of

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reality’.78 The device of the window – implicit in Vue de toits (Effet de neige) and La Rue Halévy, vue du sixième étage, explicit in Homme au balcon, boulevard Haussmann – enframes what it reveals: in connecting the frame of the painting with the frame in the painting and drawing attention to the artificiality of the image, these paintings produce an artificial Paris, as if the city were, in itself, an image. In this far away and empty city, where figures are either completely absent or too small to be individually identifiable, the spectre of the missed class encounter (bound up with social anxieties about class difference, the discursive production of ‘worker’ as a universal identity being divorced from the reality of bourgeois dominance) is excised by a spectacle of class power and possession in which the bourgeois surveys his rightful kingdom from above. In the years after 1877, therefore, Caillebotte shifted from representing himself in the middle of the various passing interactions with the anonymous crowd of modern urban life, as in Le Pont de l’Europe (Figure 3.1), towards a view of Parisian sociability filtered through the comfortingly exclusive bourgeois milieu of his own social circle. Homme au balcon, boulevard Haussmann, for example, represents Caillebotte’s yachting friend Maurice Brault experiencing Paris on behalf of the viewer, allowing us to share in the easy comfort bestowed by his class privilege.79 Paris, seen from the safety of the bourgeois interior, can be produced as the picturesque playground of commercialized and compositional delights that, in paintings such as Rue de Paris; temps de pluie (Plate 2), Le Pont de L’Europe (Figure 3.1) and Les Peintres en bâtiment (Figure 3.2), it was always in danger of becoming. The closer Caillebotte looked at Paris, the more the gaps, cracks and fissures in the ideologically produced social edifice became apparent, and the more he found succour in the visual morphology and significatory systems he was contemporaneously developing in his philatelic practice. Having taken a step back, a step inside, Paris seen from above, through a window, was always already an image: totalized, coherent and engrossing, almost photographic. Across his oeuvre Caillebotte blurred the boundaries between the work represented and the work of representation, framing his identification with the working-class men he came to paint by constructing a homology between their labour and his own. The poet Émile Bergerat, in his hostile judgement of Impressionism’s pretence to be anything more than observation without conscience or rational analysis, supposed that ‘the housepainter’s manual [wherein] the “peinture d’impression” is the term used for the first coat of paint applied by the worker on the canvas or panel … is without doubt the justification of the name “d’impressionnistes” adopted by these twentyish young artists, aggressively grouped into a school and about which the gawpers [badaud] of Paris make a big fuss’.80 Bergerat’s critique resonates with the ideological characterization of workers as unthinking or brutish machines that characterized the Third Republican class hierarchy; the artist was distinct from the worker by virtue of his capacity to think. Impressionism’s privileging of direct observation of nature and its deliberate lack of finish problematically bypassed the consciousness which made the artist more than an animal or, perhaps worse, a worker. Referring specifically to Les Peintres en bâtiment (Figure 3.2), Georges Rivière, a close friend of Renoir and supporter of the Impressionists, in contrast found no problem with this over-layering of artist and worker: ‘[The painting] has a most amusing satirical side. These workers,

 Philatelic Impressionism 101 who conscientiously stuff a pipe in contemplation of work to be done, are not lacking in observation. M. Caillebotte is a worker, a hardy researcher, upon whom, I believe, one can place solid hopes.’81 In the following chapters, I will trace this concern with Caillebotte’s class and work in relation to notions of temperament to its source – Émile Zola’s 1876 critique of Les raboteurs de parquet and Jeune homme à sa fenêtre (Plate 1 and Figure 6.2) – and examine how Zola’s contemporaneous literary practice offers the key to understanding precisely why he found Caillebotte’s stripped-off floor scrapers and covered-over bourgeois so troublesome.

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Classed corporeality and naturalist signification

M. Caillebotte’s Raboteurs de parquet and Un jeune homme à sa fenêtre have an astonishing depth. However, here is truly anti-artistic painting, neat and glass clear, bourgeois in the force of its exactitude. The imitation of truth, without original artistic temperament [l’impression originale du peintre], is a poor thing.1 Émile Zola, 1876 With these oft-quoted words, the paradigmatic naturalist writer and critic Émile Zola passed judgement on Caillebotte’s first contribution to the Impressionist cause, implying that neither a painting (Raboteurs de parquet) deemed unsuitable for the Salon by its jury the previous year nor a new painting of the artist’s brother had any place in Durand-Ruel’s Gallery on 11 rue Le Peletier. With uncharacteristic brevity, Zola’s critique of Caillebotte articulated a number of the key aesthetic and political concerns of the early Third Republic. Combining explicit statements, coded references and unconscious associations – touching on problematics concerning the place of photography in art, questions of finish and style, the tension between individual expression and objective reportage and the politics of class – Zola’s critique exemplifies the overdetermination of representations of the working body in the first years of the Third Republic. What seems to have perturbed Zola most of all was the mimetic visual quality of the paintings; for him, they were rooted in the technical imitation of reality, impoverished by Caillebotte’s failure to express his temperament. Zola’s implicit evocation of the category of temperament with his phrase ‘l’impression originale du peintre’, alluded to a central tenet of nineteenth-century aesthetic discourse. As Richard Shiff has shown, in his art criticism Zola adopted and adapted aspects of romantic and realist theories of artistic temperament whereby ‘an individual’s physiological constitution, the source of his temperament, was the cause of a necessary subjectivity of vision’.2 Given Zola’s 1866 definition of art as ‘a corner of creation seen through a temperament’, it is thus not surprising that his critique of Caillebotte slips effortlessly between identifying in Caillebotte’s paintings a lack of ‘original artistic temperament’ and determining them ‘truly anti-artistic’.3

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However, it is perhaps more surprising, given Zola’s ostensible fidelity to the ‘science’ of naturalism, that he here seems to propose an alternative understanding of truth aligned more with individual artistic temperament than with exact and precise visual observation. As Shiff argues, what made a work of art praiseworthy for Zola was its capacity to transmit both the objective truth of nature and the subjective, physiologically determined vision of the individual artist.4 Zola’s preference, therefore, was not for slavish reportage but for a unity of temperament, creativity and objective truth. In the same review, Zola contrastingly praised Degas’s Blanchisseuses for having ‘an extraordinary truth, not banal truth, but that grand and beautiful artistic truth which both simplifies and broadens’, a virtue he identified with the artist’s profound love of modernity.5 Other critics did not share Zola’s desire to distinguish between Degas’s and Caillebotte’s realisms; both were understood by most of the critics of the day as sharing a modern realist vision derived from Courbet.6 Where Zola unambiguously identified a problematic clarity in Caillebotte’s approach, art critical discourse was split between those who felt baffled by the artist’s bizarre perspective – bizarre precisely because it strayed from the ostensible objective material truth of the scene represented – and those who felt (more or less) ameliorated by their belief that his precise drawing and attention to the detail of light was the result of correct observation legibly transcribed.7 Zola thus strayed from the critical consensus in taking issue with Caillebotte’s precise and clear draughtsmanly style which, for him, did not index the artist’s technical skill as much as his failure to impart his temperament in the way exemplified by Degas; consequently, where Degas’s Blanchisseuses spoke to ‘artistic truth’, Caillebotte’s Raboteurs remained mired in ‘banal truth’. In the context of contemporaneous discourses on the politics of representation, Zola’s deployment of the category of temperament carried further ideological nuance. The notion of temperament depended upon a stable and coherent self capable of distilling the sensoria of its subjective experience into recognizable form. As such, it was intimately bound up in those discourses by which rational subjectivity was constituted as a privileged category, access to which was determined by the biological indices of one’s class and sex identity; hysterical women and brutish workers, who remained indentured to their emotions and instincts rather than the desirable reverse, were thus extrinsic to this norm. In the context of representing the working class, a discourse of temperament was thus instrumental in constituting workers as the passive object of bourgeois knowledge, locating them among the sensoria over which the bourgeois artist exerted his controlling agency. In this chapter I contextualize Zola’s remarks within the ideological and aesthetic coordinates of the early Third Republic, charting the implicit discourse of class encoded in his remarks and tracing how it functioned visually for both Naturalist and Impressionist painters. It is within this broad context that the following chapter will develop a close comparative reading of Zola’s writing and Caillebotte’s painting. Despite the universalist rhetoric of the state, the working class largely existed in a mutually antagonistic relationship to the Third Republic.8 Where Napoléon III had managed to cultivate a degree of support for his regime from within the working

 Classed Corporeality and Naturalist Signification 107 population, the bloody suppression of the Commune, subsequent repression at the hands of Moral Order and Adolphe Theirs’s model of conservative Republicanism fundamentally soured working-class opinion of the French state.9 Likewise, the bourgeoisie (from which Republicanism drew) saw workers as a dangerous cohort, whose radicalism was potentially deleterious to the Republican order they found so beneficial.10 In light of this, Republican ideology’s reliance on a definition of work as a performative and identificatory social adhesive – the basis of a shared identity and uniting communal endeavour; a thread that traversed the class divide while simultaneous suturing the overall structure founded upon it – encountered a significant problem. How would it be possible to represent work in such a way as to promote and promulgate within its subjects an identification with its desired understanding of what it meant to work, and to be a worker, without admitting into the picture the actual workers whose alienation from the Republic demonstrated the deceit of its ostensible universalism? As if to compound the problem, their previous opposition to Napoléon III and commitment to a laissez-faire conception of liberté essentially precluded Republicans from adopting wholesale his mechanisms and policy of direct and censorial control over artistic expression. Their solution was, as Nicholas Green characterized it, a ‘complex lateral shift within state apparatuses involving greater intervention in certain areas combined with strategic non-intervention in others’.11 The Republican regime pursued reforms that lifted press restrictions and transferred control of the Salon to artists, giving up the direct mechanisms of control and censorship; yet, they created an administrative Comité des travaux d’art and retained the tools of decorative commissions for municipal buildings, public sculpture, purchases of paintings and mechanisms to bestow recognition and reward, including the Legion d’Honneur.12 As Miriam R. Levin identifies, this complex and subtle system was mobilized to promote forms of art which articulated specific Republican goals and represented Republican constituencies.13 Pierre Vaisse’s institutional-centred account of painting in the Third Republic likewise follows the preference within official circles for what he terms a ‘democratic realism’, representing the everyday life of workers and peasants, through state purchases and decorative commissions.14 Through these apparatuses the Republican state elucidated its particular artistic vision of the ideologically normative worker in two ways. The first was explicit, by commissioning artists to produce painted murals to adorn the walls of some municipal buildings. The second was a subtler and more implicit nurturing of Naturalist painters whose form and content matched Republican norms and who, collectively, forged a visual culture of work that borrowed from the public belief in the veracity of Naturalist painting to bolster the Republic’s ideological truth-claims. Aware of the potential of the urban working class to deconstruct Republican ideology, painters in both these streams tended to rely on the peasant as its paradigmatic worker. The peasantry, an important demographic and electoral stratum for Opportunist Republicans, were uniquely malleable to ideological determination and were thus a mainstay of paintings of work and of workers in this period, almost completely obscuring their urban cousins.15 Their geographic and social distance from

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the Parisian metropole ensured that any truth-claims they were mobilized to evidence were safeguarded from the contradictory potential of the hardships of their lived experience. Furthermore, inherited conceptions and iconographic traditions encoded a sense of timelessness and stasis in depictions of life in the countryside, offering a soothing and stable social vision as a means of escape from fragmentary and confusing present reality.16 Particularly modern anxieties about the accelerating pace of urban life and the experience of modernity as shattering, could be allayed or diffused by a repertoire of images featuring the slower, more traditional and more wholesome life of the peasantry.17 As Albert Boime notes, by the 1870s and 1880s, the mid-century Realist depiction of the peasantry had been bifurcated into two distinct traditions: the first, headed by Millet, had been sanitized of its radical politics and internalized by the bourgeoisie as their preferred vision of the peasantry; the second, headed by Courbet, had been effectively removed from view: out of sight, out of mind.18 Moreover, the recent transformation of the social and material topography of Paris effected by Haussmannization created among the city’s residents a keen awareness of the urban–rural divide, a taste for the pastoral, and, in some artists, a desire to challenge its effects by re-inscribing into Haussmann’s Paris the Arcadia it had supposedly replaced.19 A brief examination of representative examples from both Republican decoration and Naturalist painting will demonstrate the ideological malleability and utility of the peasant motif, the ubiquity of which in art, visual culture and politics became something of a ‘cult’.20 Between 1870 and 1914, the Third Republic oversaw an expansive campaign of municipal redecoration, which saw Parisian mairies and the Hôtel de Ville adorned with painted murals articulating, ‘translated into allegories or “realist symbols” in grand decorative compositions, the most important ideological convictions of the Third Republic’.21 The decorative schemes for the mairies combined to form a comprehensive vision of the ideal Republican society.22 Some, such as Henri Gervex’s 1881 scheme on Le Mariage civil for the Salle des mariages of the Mairie du XIXe Arrondissement of Paris, lauded the secular union of man and woman, and the reproductive heteronormative nuclear family as the basic social unit. Meanwhile, others – such as Oscar Mathieu’s Allégories de la vie du citoyen in situ in the Salle des mariages of the Mairie de Clichy – celebrated the achievements, values and duties of Republican citizenship: universal suffrage, liberty and equality, economic and scientific progress, democratic suffrage and personal sacrifice.23 Work was figured as a social duty (often juxtaposed with others including procreation and charity), the obedient execution of which engendered individual wellbeing, national prosperity and social harmony. The allegorizing visual rhetoric of the murals ensconced the highly ideological production of work as a social duty behind the veil of its timelessness. As Gabriel Weisberg has noted, these representations of work jointly manifest the ethical dimension to Republican thinking on work, class and the entire social question in general.24 The insistent location of work as one element of a larger moral vision elucidated in terms of socio-civic duties formed the basis of the ideological fusion of work and social harmony, and constituted the murals’ key didactic message.

 Classed Corporeality and Naturalist Signification 109 The vast majority of these murals articulate their conception of work with almost exclusive reference to the rural labours of the peasantry. Although some murals – including Pierre-Victor Galland’s scheme for the galerie des métiers of the Paris Hôtel de Ville – depicted industrial, artisanal or urbanized labour, they were in a very small minority and, as in the case of Galland’s murals, were often dependent primarily on their specific context. Paul Baudoüin’s 1882 design for the Salle des mariages at the Mairie de Saint-Maur, Famille et Travail is a typical normative example; the mural mobilizes its rural setting, peasant subject and classicizing allegorical idiom (derived from his master Pierre Puvis de Chavannes) to articulate a readily legible panoply of labour-centric social virtue: strict gender roles enforce the boundaries between male work (a communal and manual labour) and female work (centred upon the rearing of children and the continuation of the nuclear family), which, in combination, beget material prosperity, subjective contentment and corporeal vitality. The minimally figured yet fecund setting offered its audience a pleasing admixture of modern contemporaneity and timeless harmony.25 Outside of such official corridors, the state nurtured and exploited what Richard Thomson refers to as a Naturalist ‘intellectual climate’, a public taste for legible and ostensibly descriptive representations of contemporary experience executed in a style of highly worked surfaces, crisp contour and naturalistic and photographic detail. Naturalism was the ‘dominant aesthetic of late nineteenth century France’ because, on the one hand, it accorded so closely with the Republican ideological world view, and on the other, it was flexible enough to be deployed by these same Republicans as a tool to further this same world view.26 Thomson penetrates the veneer of eclecticism and diversity that characterized the Republican discourse on the arts to reveal its more clandestine heart, beating to the rhythm of naturalism. Naturalism was not a strict aesthetic doctrine, but rather a flexible, modern and polyvalent matrix of overlapping similarities, a loosely grouped cohort united by their commitment to a bourgeois positivist-materialist world view. Naturalist painting typically prized accuracy of representation, narrative legibility, contemporaneity of subject, the semblance of a collective address combined with an awareness of its essentially bourgeois audience, quasi-scientific exactitude, rejection of idealism and a deliberately modern idiom. In essence, Naturalist painting represented French society to itself, filtered through the prism of Republican ideological values, with the intention of visualizing and thus effecting the binding moral consciousness upon which a Republican polity and social collectivity could be constructed. Naturalist painters including Léon Lhermitte and Jules Bastien-Lepage found widespread official and public acclaim for their quasi-photographic snapshots of peasant life. Captured in the middle of work in the field, images such as Lhermitte’s La Moisson (1883) and Bastien-Lepage’s Saison d’octobre (1878) offer the peasantry as a repository of some timeless and universal national identity: a fantasy community built around honest physical labour, social cohesion, natural fecundity and apolitical harmony with which Naturalism’s essentially bourgeois audience could identify; their pretence to documentary (photographic) veracity both secured their contemporary relevance and obscured their ideological didacticism.27

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Bastien-Lepage’s Les foins (Figure 5.1), painted in 1877 and exhibited at the Salon of 1878, ‘sat at the forefront of … [the] escalating revival of the peasant subject in painting’ that I have been describing.28 Les foins distinguished itself from the paradigmatic examples of the mid-century Realist tradition from which it emerged by eliding overt symbolic references to work, capturing instead an indeterminate moment of rest after or between sessions of work, the material productivity of which is signified by the haystacks. For Marnin Young, Bastien-Lepage’s utilization of what he terms ‘extreme absorption’ in the central female figure was a means to distinguish painting from photography by articulating a slower pictorial temporality than the instantaneity implied by its photographic finish and detail.29 The thematization of time in the context of work necessarily embroiled the painting in contemporaneous anxieties about the changing face of peasant labour: as Young notes, the perception of a rural labour shortage, fuelled by rural to urban migration and rising wages for seasonal agricultural workers, meant that the precise nature of peasant labour and remuneration were politically sensitive in the late 1870s and early 1880s.30 Likewise, Lhermitte’s La paye des moissonneurs (1882) dealt with the direct commodification of time involved in the peasant practice of itinerant day labour and depicted a moment after the hard work had been completed (at least for the men, maternal labour continues to occupy the female peasant in the centre of the frame). Both of these paintings are stripped of the politically radical or sensitive connotations

Figure 5.1  Jules Bastien-Lepage, Les foins, 1877. 160 × 195 cm, oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, RF 2748.

 Classed Corporeality and Naturalist Signification 111 that Courbet had inscribed into the genre, instead drawing from the more palatable mythos of Millet’s unthinkingly suffering peasants.31 Crucially, the ‘animal-like unconsciousness’ on display in the bodies and faces of peasants exhausted by work in Les foins and La paye des moissonneurs articulate a strategic disavowal of work as a creative endeavour capable of effecting material, social or subjective change.32 After a day of hard, mind-numbing labour, harvesting or building haystacks, one which robs its participant of the capacity of human thought, the peasant remains locked in the temporally static ideological realm of the ‘pastoral’. The peasant plays their part in the natural agricultural cycle, exchanging their time and energy for money, engaging in the performance of a labour which only seems to renew the annual process of repetition in which he or she is trapped. Indeed, the myth of work on display here locates work as the very motor by which the timeless pastoral idyll remains timeless. Perhaps paradoxically, the work of these peasants remakes only the status quo, with no room for creative deviation from the ordained task and sustaining the eternal cycle. The problem of how to fashion a supportive vision of work thus found its solution in those Naturalist images in which the duty of work was constructed as physical toil and separated from creative thought and the capacity to effect change. Its epistemology relied upon a categorical separation of the capacity to think, to create (especially art, vested in the bourgeois male) from the capacity to toil, to work. Promoted as an axiomatic and timeless social duty, work was promoted as the vehicle through which a hierarchical and carefully taxonomized social harmony (the homogenization of society around Republican liberal-capitalist values, ‘Republican order’) could be preserved. The bourgeois artist creates, the working subject works; this is the very barrier that divides ‘those who think from those who work with their hands’, described by Rancière.33 It was only later in the century that urban labour became visible once again, although even then as something of a rarity. As Nicolas Pierrot shows, between 1870 and 1879 only four or five paintings of industrial labour were exhibited at the Salon (crowded out by the ubiquity of the peasant cult), whereas the end of Moral Order ordained a certain vogue for representing industrial labour that lasted until about 1889.34 Nevertheless, it preserved and extended the ideological representation of work as a collective bodily activity divorced from mental creativity. Paintings like Ferdinand Gueldry’s 1886 Le Décapage des Métaux and Édouard Kaiser’s Atelier de boîtiers of 1898 emphasized the collectivity enforced by the division of labour (in the proletarianized atelier, the auteur artisan was an anachronism), mirroring the positivist-materialist fetishization of the scientific method as an objective process – exemplified in another of Gueldry’s paintings La Laboratoire municipal (prefecture de police, boulevard du Palais) (1887). Others, such as Jean André Rixens’s 1887 Laminage de l’acier: défournement et enfournement des lingots, Joseph Layraud’s 1889 Le marteau-pilon, forges et aciéries de Saint-Chamond and Fernand Cormon’s 1893 Une Forge variously emphasized the physical effort of the labour, the new instruments of work as signifiers of technological progress, the immensity of the space and enormity of equipment: all of which strategically downplayed any sense of creative agency or craft. Ernest-Georges Bergès’s 1901 Visite à l’usine après une soirée chez le directeur comically and paradigmatically

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exemplifies this ideological split between creator and toiler to have had its analogues in precisely those binaries described by Jacques Rancière: between leisure and work, between employer and employee, between capital and labour. Thus, a chasm of taste separated ‘le grand art’, valued as an expression of bourgeois genius, which positioned its artist as the empowered subject of knowledge, from the general disdain for those industrial ‘ouvriers d’art’ who created without creativity.35 The Third Republic’s celebration of an eclectic diversity of style (ranging from Puvis de Chavannes’s idealizing classicism to Léon Lhermitte’s more photographic naturalism) as an index of artistic liberty obscured the common exclusion (disavowal, screening) of the possibility of non-integratable class difference and antagonism, and its corollary in working-class subjective agency. In politics as well as in art, the Third Republic stifled plurality while ostensibly celebrating it. In his study of French elections, Nicolas Roussellier argues for the existence of a certain continuity in thinking between the Second Empire and the early Third Republic.36 He identifies systematic instrumentalization of universal suffrage under both regimes, which had the goal of stifling real plurality in favour of presenting an image of national unanimity. It was not until the 1890s that elections in France became a means of reflecting the political divisions of municipal localities and national communities. Bonapartists, Notables and Republicans after 1870 all ‘considered electoral activity as a means of ensuring the rallying of electors. … An election was not to reflect, still less to arouse divisions. On the contrary, it was to manifest the idea of a social unity within the community formed by electors.’37 As such, elections in the Second Empire and early Third Republic, in ways reminiscent of art, were deliberately depoliticized affairs, designed as a spectacle of public cohesion and tranquillity that did not necessarily exist in reality. This dynamic accords closely with Caillebotte’s brief experience of local governance in Petit Gennevilliers. In 1888, Caillebotte readily accepted the invitation of the Bonapartist mayor Edouard Pommier to stand for the centre of the commune on the electoral list. The elections of 6 and 13 May saw Caillebotte elected a municipal councillor. His tenure was by all accounts quite extraordinary: in addition to serving on various commissions (including public fêtes and the school board), Caillebotte secured a salary increase for lamp-lighters, reformed the telegram system and (displaying little patience for the paperwork and bureaucratic negotiation typically associated with the job) paid out of pocket for new street lights, gravelled roads and new uniforms for the firefighters.38 Caillebotte’s engagement with the politics of governance was, however, to be short-lived: already weary of the constant resistance his ideas met among his fellow councillors, Caillebotte’s failure to prevent the levying of a tax on boats and moorings on 31 October 1891 proved to be the final straw, and Caillebotte left office in 1892. Nevertheless, in the context of the Republic’s perceived vulnerability to leftist mass politics, Caillebotte’s activity articulated a moderate but vague Republican ethos, tinged with the kind of paternalistic benevolence symptomatic of the wider bourgeois hand-wringing characterized by Jean-Marie Mayeur as ‘social remorse’.39 Caillebotte did not stand or serve on an explicit political or ideological platform but rather was invited to stand by the mayor, relied upon his social network and standing,

 Classed Corporeality and Naturalist Signification 113 and concerned himself primarily with the local enactment of pragmatic reforms and communal improvements. Officially sanctioned art was required to bridge social gaps and promulgate a cohesive and collective Republican French identity, and in so doing to expunge from its vision of society the capacity of its working members to effect material change.40 Therefore, it was precisely in excavating from their working subjects creative agency, constituting workers as the passive objects of the bourgeois artist’s and viewer’s knowledge, that the painter was to demonstrate his own temperament. Zola’s unease at what he perceived to be Caillebotte’s failure to impart his temperament is thus not simply a question of technique or ability, but is rather related to what he reads as a perversion of the normative relationship between artist and worker: a relationship that Caillebotte rearticulates in Les raboteurs de parquet. As we shall see, where Zola’s production of working-class bodies at the whim of both external mechanical forces and internal physiological urges (gluttony, sexual promiscuity, alcoholic intoxication) naturalizes cultural class stereotypes into bodily fact, Caillebotte’s fundamental sympathy towards his fellow craftsmen creates a proximity that problematized received understandings of the relation between art and work, and between artists and workers. Caillebotte’s Impressionist colleagues, in so far as they were drawn into the orbit of this normative naturalism, typically opted to represent bourgeois leisure and public life.41 The previously dominant mythology of Impressionism as a vanguard movement sweeping away the grip held on the French visual imagination by the staid and moribund Academy in a grand iconoclastic riot of colour and sensation problematically obscures the fact that, by and large, Impressionism was not excluded from the formal and informal avenues of government patronage and approval.42 Between Third Republican discourse on the working class and Impressionist representations of them (or more accurately, the overall paucity of Impressionist representations of them), there were numerous points of mutually supportive interface. On this point, T. J. Clark has argued that Impressionism’s very claim to be modern, to represent facts of modern life in new visual forms, in fact depended on their alignment with the interests and beliefs of the bourgeois class to which they belonged.43 Monet’s Les déchargeurs de charbon (Figure 5.2), painted around 1875, represents a rare, and ultimately unsuccessful, Impressionist attempt to deal with the theme of men at work in the years following the Commune. Perhaps conscious of the politicoideological sensitives of his chosen subject, Monet came to lean on a favoured formal strategy that he had elsewhere deployed in figuring the river as a domain of pleasure. In the 1870s Monet often painted the Seine at Argenteuil as the scene of competitive regatta racing, sometimes including a bridge as a compositional device to cut across the receding lines of the river and the vertical yacht masts, aiding in the translation of three-dimensional space to the flat support, or bounding the scene to a space manageable within the remit of a scopic instant. At this moment, bridges (especially railway bridges) could function as a shorthand for technological modernity, and the corresponding standardization and homogenization of France. For Eugen Weber, the recently expanded rail network was an integral tool in Third Republican attempts to export bourgeois metropolitan values to even the most remote rural villages.44 Indeed,

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Figure 5.2  Claude Monet, Les déchargeurs de charbon, c. 1875. 54 × 66 cm, oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, RF 1993 21. it was only by railway that Argenteuil had been made immediately accessible to Paris, and therefore Monet. In painting a paradigmatically modern bourgeois pastime, Monet skilfully interweaved signifiers of Republican technological and cultural progress, articulating a fantasy of pleasure and leisure made newly accessible to his Parisian audience.45 By contrast, Les déchargeurs de charbon outlines no such happy marriage: here we find a mutated Impressionism, shorn of its lightness of touch and vibrancy of colour. The air is thick with factory smoke and carbon particulates emit from the sooty ships, infecting the paint and palate. Here we are in Asnières rather than Argenteuil, a few miles closer to Paris, geographically speaking, but in phantasmic terms the distance is unbridgeable.46 In keeping Asnières and Argenteuil so separate Monet was embracing and enacting an increasingly desirable bifurcation of life into separate spheres of ‘work’ and ‘pleasure’.47 Thus, set in the sphere of ‘labour’ Les déchargeurs de charbon is a painting about the physical effort, stiffness and monotony of work.48 The bridge, which supports carriages and pedestrians, stands as the icon under which labour takes place. In contrast to his Argenteuil paintings, here Monet has adopted a viewpoint facing headlong down the river, so that, rather than receding into the picture space, the bridge stands flat to the surface. Toiling underneath are a series of undifferentiated coal-

 Classed Corporeality and Naturalist Signification 115 haulers unloading a shipment of coal, travelling across planks on the same horizontal access occupied by the bridge. These figures are all painted in the same gamut of drab and murky olives, greys and blacks; their faces obscured by their coal sacs. The very title of the painting engenders an expectation of dehumanization, the representation of a type. The workers are crushed by the monotonous effort of their labour; they are homogenized into an empty collectivity: a grouping of automaton shells, evacuated of real subjectivity. Les déchargeurs de charbon (Figure 5.2) represents Monet’s failure to articulate a visual lexicon of class and labour within the boundaries of Impressionism. Monet acquiesces to a number of the imperatives of Republican ideology, representing the fact of work itself in a modern visual language, united by signifiers of Republican achievements and the progress of techno-capitalism. However, the non-impressionist drabness, the silhouetting of the workers, the dehumanizing oppression of overall effect, goes too far: Monet fails to adequately parse the evacuation of agency from the workers he represents in positive terms. The painting does not articulate the class harmony which was (supposedly) the compensatory benefit of the Republican settlement. Monet’s collectivity is one of crushing homogenization. Jean-François Raffaëlli, another member of the Impressionist circle, likewise responded to the general desire and institutional taste for convincing and soothing images of class society, and in so doing drew more extensively from the reservoir of Naturalist imagery. Marnin Young has identified the aestheticization and politicization of time as the central thematic and formal consideration of Raffaëlli’s paintings of banlieue characters.49 The debate within pictorial realism on how best to foster the illusory passage of time intersected with the politicization of time achieved through the imposition of factory discipline and organized labour’s response in campaigning for the eight-hour day. Images of rag pickers, absinthe drinkers, newspaper readers, and garlic pickers, marginalized types on the geographical and socio-economic fringes of Paris, spoke as déclassés to a bourgeois fear of downward social mobility, as well as moralizing fears about alcohol, political radicalism and asociality (Figure 5.3). Indeed, these last three traits were commonly held to have given rise to the Commune (and, as Young notes, the notion that Communards had fallen through the floor of society was current during this period).50 Given this potentially dangerous subject matter, it is perhaps surprising that Raffaëlli was able to garner success and recognition from the Republican bourgeois elite, even being entrusted to paint a large and overtly propagandist portrait of Clemenceau in 1885. Raffaëlli’s anecdotal scenes from his marginalized constituency (Raffaëlli lived among his subjects in Asnières) represented, in a realistic and believably contemporaneous way, the world outside the confines of the normative Republican class system. These figures have rejected honest work in favour of the oblivion of the bottle, or the deadend of political radicalism, and have thus fallen out of the social reality altogether. Absence of work is thus equated to absence of identity, to a subjective and social void: Raffaëlli’s figures tend to be self-absorbed, unable or unwilling to meaningfully identify with each other nor offer themselves up to be identified with by the viewer. It is not the honest exhaustion of the hard-working Naturalist peasant, who is both productive and

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Figure 5.3  Jean-François Raffaëlli, Les buveurs d’absinthe, 1881. 110 × 110 cm, oil on canvas. Private Collection. rewarded, surrounded by signifiers of prosperity and sociality. Ideology functions to set the limits of the thinkable and the sayable and to install itself as the single, natural possible configuration of socio-symbolic relations. Raffaëlli’s paintings offer the visual evidence for such ideological claims by elucidating existence beyond these limits as a kind of purgatory in a painterly style that clandestinely borrowed from the supposed veracity of the photographic image. Zola’s evocation of ‘glass’ as a pejorative correlative to the neatness of Caillebotte’s technique was a clear allusion to contemporaneous debates about the place of photography in art, which hinged precisely on this dialectic between formal innovation and visual acuity.51 Indeed, the reference to ‘glass’ was a rather unambiguous allusion to the centrality of glass in the photographic process, from lenses to glass plate negatives. As we have seen, the critical reflex of comparing Caillebotte’s subsequent canvases to photographs, the desire to read them in light of the spectacular visuality understood at this time to be ‘photographic’, originated, at least in part, with the terms in which Zola expressed his distaste for Caillebotte’s style. Just as a critique of ‘imitation’ effortlessly fell into the implicit language of the ‘photographic’, Caillebotte’s ‘bourgeois’ clarity marked him out as an artist whose vision was rooted in convention and prejudice. Zola’s 1868 public defence of Manet – made on the grounds that the artist’s primary concern was freshness of vision, freed from the prejudices and conventions endemic to stale bourgeois aesthetics – as well as his long friendship with, and staunch (at

 Classed Corporeality and Naturalist Signification 117 least until the late 1880s) support of Cézanne – exemplify the value Zola placed on formal innovation, which he saw as central to art itself and a necessary condition for the expression of artistic temperament and truth.52 Thus the real ideological kernel of Zola’s critique of Caillebotte as it relates to the politics of class in the Third Republic lies less in the explicit reference to his ‘bourgeois exactitude’, a swipe at the conservative standards of decorum against which he, and the formally innovative artists and writers he strove to annex for Naturalism, battled; but rather, in the implicit allusion to temperament, which encoded ideologically normative assumptions about the proper relationship between a bourgeois artist and his working-class subjects, assumptions that Zola’s unease indicates may have been transgressed. As the preeminent French Zola scholar Henri Mitterand has made clear, Zola conceptualized his journalism and art criticism as testing grounds for the development of his theoretical and literary ideas, and an avenue through which he could engage with his contemporary society.53 Furthermore, Robert Lethbridge has argued that Zola’s art criticism was part of a strategy of self-promotion by means of annexing artists to the cause of ‘naturalism’, a process which reached its zenith with Le Naturalisme au Salon of 1880.54 Bearing these two factors in mind, we must put Zola’s reading of Caillebotte in relation to his contemporaneous literary project L’Assommoir, the seventh volume of his great novel cycle, Les Rougon-Macquart, which was just beginning its serialization in Le Bien Public as Zola was writing his review of the April 1876 Impressionist exhibition.55 L’Assommoir follows the life of Gervaise Macquart, a provençale working-class woman, and her ‘inexorable downfall … in the poisonous atmosphere of our industrial suburbs’.56 Gervaise, like many of those around her, succumbs to ‘intoxication and idleness’, the symptoms of a moral degradation caused by poverty itself.57 Despite Zola’s reductionist claim that such a narrative is ‘simply morality in action’, the novel undertakes a more nuanced and complex investigation of working-class experience than this straightforward deterministic association of material want, idleness, intoxication and moral depravity would seem to imply.58 The novel is caught between, on the one hand, the ambition to produce objective scientific knowledge about the working class in a way that corresponded to the normative materialist bourgeois epistemology of the period and, on the other, a perverse and persistent fascination with moments where the body, pushed to its limits in one way or another, contains the potential to fall beyond the remit of that knowledge. L’Assommoir bears witness to how Zola’s deep understanding of contemporaneous ideologies of work, body and class (acquired through meticulous research) led him to an almost obsessive fixation on their moments of contact with the extremes of corporeal experience. It was this eye for the potentially vulgar details of working-class life that dominated the reception of the novel, with conservative critics, on the one hand, incensed by Zola’s transgression of the limits of acceptable textual representation, and the public at large, on the other, scandalized but fascinated.59 As Sandy Petrey and Brian Nelson indicate, it was precisely Zola’s rejection of bourgeois decorum through his insistent depictions of bodily functions that proved most shocking to critics and readers.60 As the defensive preface that accompanied the publication of L’Assommoir as a novel later

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in 1877 reveals, Zola himself felt that charges of vulgarity stemmed from the form of the novel, that the working-class slang he had directly observed and carefully documented was infused into the very fabric of the text. ‘My crime’, he wrote, ‘is to have had the literary curiosity to gather together the language of the people and present it in a carefully fashioned mould. Ah yes, the novel’s form, there lies my crime!’.61 It was precisely the truth of his observations that, in Zola’s mind, justified his ‘crimes’ against the bourgeois novel form; Zola felt vindicated that he had produced ‘the first novel about the common people that does not lie and that smells of the common people’.62 Zola’s conflation of value, form and truth around the pole of scientific observation was nothing new; however, it is the evocation of the olfactory that is key here. When viewing Caillebotte’s painting of working men with the conservative denunciations of his own attempt at the theme ringing in his ears, and the germinal seeds of his riposte circling around his mind, what Zola searched for and could not find was that legitimizing element beyond mere visual truth – what Henri Mitterand has termed the ‘mythical dimension’ – the smell of the people, central to his own naturalist project (and by extension the future of French art and literature).63 Implicitly addressed in his evocation of ‘the smell of the people’, intertwined with his perceived formal and methodological innovations, is thus a fidelity to even the limits of their corporeal experience: in his criticism of Caillebotte as anti-artistic, what Zola missed but could not name was precisely this fidelity to the body. However, despite Zola’s own high assessment of his novel’s commitment to a holistic and formally innovative representation of embodied life that paid no attention to received standards of decorum, L’Assommoir was actually instrumental in articulating and inculcating the ideologically normative terms by which the labouring body was imagined in the society of the early Third Republic. Zola’s ostensible realism with regard to the body masked a more clandestine but insistent correlation of, in the words of Petrey, ‘the natural fact of the body’s existence with the social fact of class division’, that is, making the ‘smell of the people … a natural given’.64 In many ways, work became the ideological point de capiton of the bourgeois ideology of the Third Republic, wherein the entire ideological edifice and the social forms over which it presided relied on a communal identification with the fact of being a worker in a community of workers. The disparate and fractured socio-symbolic realm was made to cohere around this core identity which, as a necessary consequence of its universalization, was hollowed out, responding to and representing not concrete practices but rather pure self-referential signification. As being a worker became less about actually doing work and more of a natural given, that is, the physical and performative act of work was divorced from the identity position of ‘worker’, as Anson Rabinbach has shown, late nineteenth-century scientific discourses increasingly produced the body as a ‘human motor’.65 Through what Rabinbach terms a ‘Social Helmholtzianism’, European thought focused on work as an expression of ‘corporeal physics’, the mixing of matter and energy.66 It is this dynamic that Zola taps into in L’Assommoir. What makes the characters he writes workers, or working-class common people, is not the work they do (or don’t do, as is often the case), but rather their ‘smell’, their genetic (mis)inheritance; conversely, the work they do is nothing but a straightforward mechanical process, comprehensible

 Classed Corporeality and Naturalist Signification 119 in a scientific rhetoric central to Zola’s grand preoccupations for his naturalist methodology. Zola thus produces a comprehensive fantasy of work as a natural and inevitable process that structures social relations and ensures subjective coherency. As such, there can be no escape from one’s inherited class identity, and no alternative to the hierarchical and inegalitarian social forms engendered by the institutionalization of class (qua bodily) difference. Zola’s clandestinely complicit, but ostensibly radical, attention to the working, and working-class, body in his own literary practice thus complicates his judgement of Caillebotte. Is it possible that what Zola read as a problematical bourgeois conservatism was in actual fact an altogether more ambivalent, potentially radical and deconstructive, response to the same ideological imperatives regarding the representation of working and classed bodies that his own writing had so deeply internalized? In order to understand Caillebotte’s paintings of classed and working bodies in their multiple contexts, and unravel the tangled intertextuality of Zola’s writing and Caillebotte’s images, we must first examine the bodies Zola produced in L’Assommoir in depth, before moving on to consider Caillebotte’s canvases as putative responses to the same problems approached by Zola. That is to say, we must retrace and re-evaluate the temptingly straightforward chronology put forward by the critic Bariolette in 1877: ‘After l’Assommoir, here are the Impressionists. After the novel comes painting’.67

6

Between Caillebotte and Zola

The more elbow grease you put into it, the more it shines.1

Émile Zola, 1877

The ease with which Bariolette’s rhetoric moved between the novels of Zola and the paintings of the Impressionists, both for him ‘unhealthy curiosities’, was in part a function of Zola’s highly visual literary style.2 Such connections with Impressionist painting was something Zola himself worked to cultivate: ‘I didn’t merely support the Impressionists,’ he is famously quoted as saying, ‘Through brush-strokes, tonalities and colour-values of my own descriptive palette, I brought them into the literary domain. Every one of my books … is evidence of contact and interchange with the painters. … For they helped me paint in a new way, in literary terms.’3 Zola set out his observations of his society by way of lengthy and highly detailed descriptions that appealed first of all to his reader’s ocular imagination, what William J. Berg describes as an ‘overwhelming sense of visual emergence’.4 Yet, more recent scholarship has uncovered beneath Zola’s cultivation of visual spectacle a broader corporeal epistemology. Susan Harrow’s revisionist account of Zola articulates the radically modern and formally innovative ways in which he approached the problems associated with textual representation of the working body.5 Harrow focuses on Zola’s formal innovations alongside his insistent and holistic attentiveness to corporeal experience in extremis, both of which have typically gone unmentioned in critical readings of the writer (the former in favour of a more limited view of Zola the arch-anti-modernist wedded to a dogmatic naturalist norm; the latter in favour of an exclusive focus on the erotic body). She argues that Zola’s naturalist desire to record and document the totality of corporeal experience (the body at work, at war, at play; the tired body, the injured or abused body; the transformed body or the dehumanized body), his desire to be a ‘chronicler of corporeality’, necessarily resulted in narrative moments in which this naturalist impulse is resisted by a proto-modernist tendency towards hybridity, fracturing, fissure, ellipsis and self-reflexivity.6 In this view, for Zola, the body, especially the working body (which is the overriding fascination of his writing), is a complex sign-system which works to refigure the normative and teleological Naturalist epistemology as something altogether less seizable, figure-able or symbolizable.

 Between Caillebotte and Zola 121 Hannah Thompson’s work on the Taboo bodies of nineteenth-century France likewise highlights Zola’s fundamental fascination with the extremes of corporeal experience and existence, mapping his texts onto a wider matrix of ideologically produced bodies and their concomitant gendered power structures.7 Responding to this revisionist scholarship, Claire White persuasively argues for the fundamental significance of leisure in Zola’s writing, paying explicit attention to how work and leisure reflexively inscribe themselves on the body.8 For White, Zola’s evocation of alienating work depends upon a fantasy of leisure as an emancipatory hors travail, a fantasy which in turn decays into a reality of free time isomorphic in form to work and thus equally liable to be alienating.9 Even when Zola recounts an episode of leisure as an anecdotal respite from the repetitious monotony of labour, such as the nuptial excursion to the Louvre in L’Assommoir, its constitution as the manifestation of a negative freedom from work (as opposed to positive, absolute freedom) engenders an imperative to be as unlike work as possible, one that, in White’s reading, displaces spontaneous enjoyment and stultifies its participants. Even when they do not work, work nevertheless functions to shape the subjectivity and indelibly mark the body of Zola’s labouring characters.10 The narrative of moral decline in L’Assommoir is etched onto the bodies of Zola’s characters with an objectivizing dispassion. As Gervaise becomes ‘even more slovenly … a proper lazy-bones’ and sinks into alcoholism and idleness, her previously thin body becomes fatter and less desirable, her limp becomes more pronounced, she suffers beatings from Coupeau and in turn beats Nana, and eventually ‘[rots] to death’, leaving behind nothing but a green corpse and a bad smell.11 Likewise, Coupeau’s rejection of work and of bourgeois morality, in favour of alcoholic over-consumption following his fall from the roof of the hospital, is punished by a corporeal decay and loss of bodily autonomy which manifests itself in a bitterly ironic re-enactment of his former trade.12 Coupeau’s body is at once objectivized as a corpselike ‘leaden grey tinged with green’ and a ‘decaying barrel’.13 Gervaise and Coupeau’s rejection of their prior belief in the bourgeois morality of hard work, abhorrence of idleness and of alcoholic spirits, economy of expenditure, family propriety and materialistic desire is enacted in a purely corporeal register – through greedy over-consumption, slatternliness, promiscuity, intoxication and laziness – and punished in torments of the flesh.14 The ultimate humiliation for Gervaise and Coupeau, a reflection and result of their litany of failings, according to Zola’s doctrine of inheritance (adopted and adapted from Hippolyte Taine theory of race, milieu, moment), is the fate of their daughter Nana. As a child, witnessing her father’s drunken slumber in his own vomit and her mother’s going to bed with Lantier ‘with grave attention [… and] starving eyes … alight with sensual curiosity’ perverted her irrecoverably.15 Aged fifteen, vain and ‘fully developed’ into an object of sexual desire (described in suitably objectivizing and fragmenting language) and a sexually desiring subject, Nana rejects the world of work in which she ought properly to find a place in favour of an ‘unnatural’ desire for sensual pleasure, commodifying her body as a dancehall dancer, using her body in the wrong way to make a living.16 The bodily morality of L’Assommoir is integrally intertwined with a less-thanstraightforward morality of work. Gervaise and Coupeau’s primary transgressions –

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over-indulgence in food, alcohol and sex – are problematic because they alienate the characters from the normative values of hard work exemplified by characters such as Goujet. Effect meets cause in the ultimate humiliation of both Gervaise and Coupet, who are forced into degrading or farcical ‘work’. However, adopting the morally correct attitude to work is no guarantee of salvation; indeed, Zola emphasizes that the eight-year-old Lalie died brutally at the hands of her father ‘because, though only a child, she had the heart and mind of a true mother, while her breast was still too frail and small to bear such a heavy burden of maternity’.17 Lantier, whose flexible and hypocritical attitude towards work and bosses intersects with the positions eventually taken up by Gervaise and Coupeau, ultimately goes unpunished.18 The Lorilleux, by all accounts hard workers, are also vindictive misers and gossips; the internalization of the status of the material of their work (gold) as if it were an index of their own virtue and worth characterizes their social relations and traps them in a life-long mire of repetitive work, the productivity of which is measured as much in leagues of chain as it is in bodily decay.19 Thus, L’Assommoir – despite the ostensible associative matrix Zola erects across, on the one hand, work, cleanliness, health, and virtue and, on the other, idleness, dirtiness, sickness and vice – undercuts this simplistic moral spectrum. As Zola’s characters often remind the reader, work doesn’t do itself.20 However, Zola often produces work as a brute mechanical process, delighting in recounting at length its specific details, jargon and minutiae, leaving little room for the body.21 In L’Assommoir it is work that makes (and breaks) the worker, rather than the reverse. At these moments, the body recedes into a language of neutral reportage, merging and blending with the spaces, processes, tools and machines of the trade. This is especially evident in Zola’s description of the wash-house: It was an enormous shed with a level ceiling, exposed beams resting on castiron pillars, and big clear glass windows. … Washing tubs lined either side of the central aisle and rows of women stood at them, their sleeves rolled right up to their shoulders, their necks bare, their skirts hitched up showing their coloured stockings and heavy laced boots. They were beating away like mad, laughing, leaning back to yell something over the uproar, then bending low over their tubs again, a foul-mouthed, coarse, ungainly lot, soaking wet as if they’d been in a downpour, with red, steaming skin. Water was streaming everywhere around and under them, hot water from buckets lugged over and emptied in one go, cold water from open taps pissing down, splashed from beaters, drips from rinsed washing, puddles they were sloshing about in that ran off over the sloping flagstones in little trickles. And, amidst the shouts and the rhythmic thumping and the gentle patter of rain, in that tempest of noise muffled by the wet ceiling, the steam engine, covered with a fine white dew, puffed and snorted away over on the right without ever stopping, as if the frenzied vibration of its fly-wheel was regulating the whole outrageous din.22

Although ostensibly adopting the language of a sensory register, conveying a subjective auditory relation to the work of the washer women, Zola continually puts this work

 Between Caillebotte and Zola 123 into relation with natural or mechanical forces, the ‘gentle patter of rain’ and the snorting ‘steam engine’, so that they may blend and cross contaminate. Where he does produce the body, displayed under ‘hitched up’ skirts, soaking wet and red raw, it is only as a singular component in a larger, potentially overwhelming, visual and auditory spectacle of work. Zola pulls back from the corporeal index to the ocular scene, the affective dimension, rather than merely the sight of ‘red, steaming skin’; he is far more interested in the mechanical and the procedural, the ‘rhythmic thumping’. In his description of Goujet, too, Zola screens glimpses of the body behind a veritable torrent of descriptive signification, and it is worth quoting at length because the effect lies as much in the sheer quantity of words as in their ostensible meaning: Goujet waited, tongs in hand, watching an iron bar heating. The bright glare lit him up mercilessly, without a shadow. His sleeves were rolled up and his shirt open at the neck, showing his bare arms and his bare chest and his delicate pink skin covered with curly golden hair, and, with his head a little sunk between his heavy, thickly muscled shoulders, his face watchful and his pale eyes fixed steadily on the flame, he looked like a giant at rest, tranquil in his strength. When the iron bar was white-hot he grasped it with the tongs and cut it into even pieces, hitting it gently on the anvil with his hammer as if he were cutting glass. He then put the pieces back in the fire, removing them one at a time to shape them. He was making hexagonal rivets. He put each piece into a heading frame, levelling down the metal that formed the head, flattening the six sides, then tossing each finished, red-hot rivet on to the ground, where its vivid glow died away against the blackness; and he was hammering continuously as he did this, swinging the fivepound hammer with his right hand, each hammer-blow completing a detail as he turned and fashioned his iron with such mastery that he could work while chatting and looking at people. A silvery ringing came from the anvil. He was completely at ease, not sweating at all, hammering away quite naturally, with no more apparent effort than when he cut out pictures at home, in the evening.23

Zola’s love of precise detail produces passages wherein work emerges as a set of instructions determining, rather than determined by, its corporeal executor.24 Integrating craft-specific language with his step-by-step narration of the working process, Zola writes as if producing an instructional handbook on different aspects of the world of work, be it the laundresses or the synthetic flower factory.25 The immediacy of his retellings of the processes of work lies in their repeatable and detached nature; Zola writes work as if it were an objective process that possesses an existence extrinsic to its workers. The body is simply the vehicle, a machine or ‘automaton’, through which this almost metaphysical and eternal process is made manifest.26 Zola’s language makes no clear differentiation between man and machine, united as they are by the process of work.27 It is only when imputed with the weight of sexual desire (the desire of a spectating character, the desire of a spectated worker to be desired, the desire of the reader ciphered through the desires of the characters) that Zola’s descriptions of work bring

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descriptive focus to bear upon the body. The most notable examples from the novel are the passages when Gervaise travels to the forge to observe Goujet: What a superb figure of a man, when you saw him at work! The light from the great fire in the furnace shone directly on to him. His short hair curling over his low brow and his handsome yellow beard falling in little ringlets glowed with light, illuminating his whole face with their threads of gold, so you could truly say that his face was made of gold. What’s more his neck was like a pillar, and as white as a child’s; his chest was huge, broad enough for a woman to lie on; his sculptured shoulders and arms might have been copied from those of some statue of a giant, in a museum. When he braced himself to swing his hammer you could see his muscles swell into mounds of flesh that rippled and hardened under the skin; his shoulders, his chest and his neck expanded; he seemed to give off light, becoming beautiful, all-powerful, like a benevolent god.28

Zola writes the body as desirable by fracturing it into its constituent part-objects in a manner analogous to his fetishization of work’s procedural, step-by-step, flow. It is precisely work that melds these fragments, rendered in a language which insistently compares them to singular inanimate sculptural objects, into an overall effect that immediately transcends man to exist as a ‘god’. Zola’s objectification of the body as a visual spectacle is strategically deployed in order to allay any anxieties that might emerge from its fragmentation into part-objects. In perhaps the novel’s most enduring passage, oft-cited and oft-illustrated, the wash-house fight between Gervaise and Virginie, Zola’s almost Lacanian insistence upon the latent capacity of desire to shatter the subject’s narcissistic illusion of completeness (of self and other) comes to the fore.29 One important facet of Lacan’s il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel is that sexual drives are never directed at complete subjects, the whole person, but rather at part-objects: there is no possible sexual relation between two subjects, only between a subject and the objet petit a. The non-existence of the sexual relation thus pertains to the phantasmic character of desire, in the sense that it positions the subject in a certain way with respect to the objet petit a. The wash-house fight represents a crescendo of physical and symbolic violence, waged between two women attempting to save face in the light of a chain of humiliations spurred by Lantier’s immoral carousing. The Parisian patois of vulgar insults and threats of violence, which ostentatiously demonstrates the extent to which Zola has done his research among the common people, infects the authorial voice.30 The fight itself is at once visceral, corporeal and sexual: Virginie had jumped at Gervaise’s throat. She was squeezing her neck, trying to strangle her. Gervaise freed herself with a violent thrust and grabbed the ends of Virginie’s hair, tugging as if to pull her head off. Once more the battle was joined, but silently, without any screams or insults. They didn’t try to wrestle, but each went for the other’s face, pinching and clawing with open hands and hooked fingers at any flesh she could grasp. The tall brunette’s red ribbon and blue chenille net went flying; her bodice had split at the neck, showing a lot of skin and most

 Between Caillebotte and Zola 125 of one shoulder, while the blonde was half naked, one sleeve of her white bodice ripped off somehow or other and a tear in her chemise revealing the naked curve of her waist.31

Once the bodily activity morphs from fighting to undressing, switching to the register of sexual desire and display, Zola drops the names of his characters, instead referring to them as the ‘tall brunette’ and ‘the blonde’, as if the domains of symbolic identification and of unconscious desire cannot coexist on the page. The progressive revealing of Gervaise’s and Virginie’s bodies is a revealing of part-objects, of ‘most of one shoulder’, of ‘the naked curve of [a] waist’. Crucially, desire is aroused and articulated through vision, a voyeuristic fantasy enacted for the benefit of the (presumably bourgeois, presumably male) reader.32 Zola recognizes that ‘man’s desire is the desire of the Other’, that is, bearing of a social dimension and constituted in a dialectic with (one’s perception of) the desires of others.33 The fight is watched by Charles, ‘a great big chap, with a huge neck’, who enjoys ‘the bits of naked flesh the two women were displaying. The little fair one was as plump as a partridge. What a joke if her chemise split open! “Hey!” he muttered, giving a wink, “she’s got a birthmark under her arm”.’34 As the fight rises in a crescendo of sexualized violence between bodies rendered as (part-)objects by the voyeuristic gaze of its spectators, as Gervaise ‘[slips] her hand into the slit [and tears off Virginie’s drawers] exposing bare thighs and bare buttocks’ and spanks her ‘flesh’ with a wooden beater, making ‘a red weal [appear] on the white skin’ with each blow, Charles, who acts as a cipher for the desire of the reader, becomes overcome and estranged from the symbolic, from language, only able to mutter ‘Oh! Oh!’.35 What brings us back from the brink, from collapsing completely into Charles’s (and the reader’s) obscene fantasy of sapphic sex/violence is Zola’s rhetoric of work: ‘Once into their stride, they pounded each other vigorously, rhythmically, like laundresses pounding dirty clothes. When a blow landed on flesh, it sounded muffled, as if it had landed in a tub of water.’36 The scene of spanking which robs Charles of his ability to speak is almost immediately parsed as work, Gervaise is described as ‘keeping her eyes on her work’.37 This is not simply a matter of Zola drawing from the essentialist discourses of his age in order to make the case that woman’s eternal work is the arousal and satisfaction of male sexual and scopic drives, that woman’s work is in being the object-cause of masculine desire; what is also at stake is Zola’s strategic deployment of the language of work at precisely the moment when the body is at its most unruly, when it threatens to penetrate and put asunder the carefully constructed naturalist matrix of description and the ideological and epistemological nexus of male bourgeois domination it had engendered. The capacity of (male) desire, in its voyeuristic objectification of the (female) body, to fragment it into desirable part-objects, threatens to undermine the narcissistic illusion of wholeness fundamental to the integrity of the subject’s imaginary relation to itself. Zola’s proto-modernist tendency to write the body in extremis comes to be sublimated through the fixing, structuring and sanitizing rhetoric of work.

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Work operates as a facet of experience in which sexual desire is aroused and then sublimated; work as a physical process offers up to its spectators tantalizing glimpses of the body fractured into part-objects while simultaneously exerting fixative symbolic pressure which produces the body as a singular unit capable of bearing the inscription of social class. There are numerous instances in the novel where work offers up the body of its executor as a part-object of desire.38 When Gervaise returns to Goujet’s forge Zola’s language reaches orgasmic intensity, offering the clearest example in the novel of the sublimating power of work: Her [Gervaise’s] heart would leap to the rhythm of the hammers. She’d be very flushed when she went in … Goujet would be waiting for her, bare – armed and bare-chested. … she loved him all the more when he swung it [his hammer] with his big, heavily-muscled arms. … They couldn’t have better satisfied their love had they been together in a room with the door double-locked. … There was nothing more she could desire, her pleasure was complete.39

Crucially, the pleasure wrapped up in work as a physical activity is always a voyeuristic pleasure, the pleasure of the observer (be it a character, the reader or both), but never the participant. The pleasure Goujet takes in hammering at the anvil is ciphered through Gervaise’s gaze; it is the pleasure of being watched at work rather than the pleasure of working in and of itself. When properly rooted and fixed in the visualsymbolic domain, this desire poses no issues for Zola; this unproblematic desire is offered up to the reader in the same clear and precise descriptive language as the world of work. Unruly desire and unruly workers find themselves ‘resolved’ through analogous mechanisms. Thus, Zola was able to contain the working body within a matrix of language which neutralized it and rendered it completely knowable to the reader, rerouting even the most dangerous aspects of the flesh (activated and made manifest by the physical toil of work) through an atomizing or objectivizing rhetoric. Thus, in conjunction with the suturing power of naturalist visuality, the potentially anxiety-inducing spectacle of the body at work can be voyeuristically consumed. It is precisely in this objectivizing rhetoric that Zola’s pretensions to scientific veracity emerge most clearly. Zola positions his descriptions of work within a contemporaneous discourse whereby knowledge was produced about the working class through scientific observation of their working practices. Zola’s focus on the details of process and technical jargon belies the fundamental assumption that knowing their work is a prerequisite to knowing the working class. Zola’s bodies mean in relation to work: it is through the processes of work that they become legible and knowable as classed (and thus classifiable) objects in a larger economic and ideological matrix. As Susan Harrow puts it, it is the very rhythms and processes of work themselves, insofar as they ‘impose [their] own grammar on the body … magnify[ing] the body as [they] magnif[y] language’, that make the body legible: ‘Zola writes the body at work, a body which acquires its own legibility in the course of its labours.’40 In the context of Republican ideology, this was a highly normative gambit on the part of Zola, for whom class was neither a straightforward structural position (as a Marxist definition would hold, class

 Between Caillebotte and Zola 127 as one’s relative position with regards to the means of production) nor an identity that was performative and therefore mutable. Rather, Zola writes class as a natural given, an inescapable genetic inheritance that is made manifest and operative by the physical activity of labour.41 Thus, Zola’s particular elucidation of the relationship between class, labour and the body was deeply ideological and depended upon the capacity of his naturalist signification to screen the body, to shield his readers from the fracturing consequences of toil and desire, from excesses and surpluses of a corporeal character. Fredric Jameson likewise affords the body a central place in his recent critical elucidation of The Antinomies of Realism, the most central among them being that between the ‘pure form of storytelling’ inherited from the genre of the récit and ‘impulses of scenic elaboration, description and above all affective investment’.42 The vector by which Jameson unpicks the antagonistic symbiosis of these two impulses – the narrative impulse and the impulse towards a kind of affective ekphrasis – is temporality. For Jameson, narrative enforces the stultifying tripartite chronology of past-present-future, generating meanings that, however temporally positioned, are inherently irrevocable (‘over and done with’); affect opens a self-sustaining, ‘eternal’, ‘scenic present’ that sustains experiences of a completely different register than those that drive forward the narrative.43 Jameson uses the term ‘affect’ to refer to those unspeakable, nameless tenors of embodied experience that slip language (and therefore exist beyond the culturally determined framework of named and nameable emotions) and exist in (productive) tension with structures of meaning and the strategies for its production.44 Affect, a component of embodied being-in-the-worldness, the body’s present, is nevertheless completely reducible to neither the body, nor the psyche. Rather, affect is free-floating (‘this strange and disembodied element which is affect’) and manifests, in realism, as a counterforce to narrative and description; as disruptions of linear chronology; and as perturbations of sense made senseless, of feeling liberated from meaning and made allegorical with respect to itself.45 The economy of affect is structured around a distinct temporality – ‘which I will call the sliding scale of the incremental, in which each infinitesimal moment differentiates itself from the last by a modification of tone and an increase or diminution of intensity’ – is (seemingly) unbound by context or causation and ‘wax[es] and wan[es] not only in intensity but across the very scale and gamut of such nuances’ in a manner that Jameson identifies as analogous to musical chromaticism.46 Among the many examples of Realist practice from which Jameson draws, Zola’s is characterized as the ‘codification of affect’.47 Quoting from Le Ventre de Paris, Au Bonheur des Dames, L’Argent and La débâcle, Jameson identifies in Zola’s lengthy and detailed descriptions of Les Halles, Au Bonheur des Dames, the Exposition Universelle of 1867, and Communard Paris aflame, irruptions of sensory overload – of smell as well as sight – that become autonomous and exert a force that counterbalances the plot. The stinking cheeses of Les Halles, for example, pullulate into ‘a kind of odorous polyphony and dissonance’ that ‘orchestrate[s the characters’] machinations at the same time that it exasperates them’ by force of their sheer meaningless excess.48 Zola’s quasi-scientific theory of heredity might seem to represent the continued salience of narrative and

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the récit form, the Damoclean weight of history and a stultified chronological temporality. However, Jameson is inspired to argue contrariwise by a passage from Le docteur Pascal in which the eponymous doctor comes to realize that the efficacy of his intravenous treatments is a function not of their content, the medicine injected, but rather the ‘simple mechanical effect’ of the injection itself.49 Jameson reads this as Zola recognizing the significance of form as such over content; thus understood, Zola’s great family tree is less a structural matrix of individualized narratives of differing content and more ‘the abstract fever-chart of affects and intensities’ wherein the characters’ destinies, blighted by a diseased heredity, are manifestations of differing intensities of the same underlying form, whether expressed as ‘obsession, neurosis, psychosis, morbid ambition, erotomania, the lust for power and so forth’.50 Thus, Zola’s great novel cycle is the codification of affect in so far its narratives are ‘what happen to individuals and their destinies when their récits fall into the forcefield of affect and submit to its dynamic’.51 Elsewhere in the volume, Jameson argues that ‘the realistic novel has a vested interest, an ontological stake, in the solidity of social reality, on the resistance of bourgeois society to history and to change.’52 That is, the normative realist novel, or at least its naturalist narrative paradigm, was conceived of as an inoculation against a particularly threatening historicity that nevertheless registered the bourgeoisie’s entropic anxieties and their fear of déclassement.53 How this insight as to the function of realism with respect to nineteenth-century ideologies of class might be read against Jameson’s specific reading of Zola’s codification of affect isn’t made explicit. Given that Jameson understands affect as, in one respect, embodiment disembodied, it is perhaps no surprise that he finds little use for the passages in novels like L’Assommoir where the body itself becomes the object of the novelist’s descriptive activity. Although he notes that ‘Zola’s novels are immense accumulations of bodies … in full effervescence, paralysis or decay’, he approaches these bodies only obliquely, by means of the perturbations they effect in the novels’ ‘narrative apparatus’.54 However, as I have attempted to demonstrate with the case of L’Assommoir, with the specific goal of understanding the function of Zola’s text with respect to the Third Republic’s ideologies of class and labour, it is most productive to directly investigate how Zola attempted, and often failed, to produce the body as an object of his descriptive practice (the operative tension being that between content and form), as opposed to Jameson’s focus on affect as an internal disruptor of novelistic form. I have thus found it more productive to speak of desire, rather than affect, as the counterweight to (ideological) meaning, with labour oscillating between these two polarities – arousing and sublimating desire while all the while inscribing fixed class relations onto bodies – and bodies appearing and disappearing, congealing, splintering and liquifying by the force of that movement. It is the tension – between corporeal fragmentation and totalization, between the fixative pressure of naturalist signification and the fracturing spectre of desire – that the processes of work bring to bear upon the body, a tension that Zola ultimately resolves in the naturalization of class as a bodily (rather than social) fact, that underpins the writer’s search for the ‘smell of the people’ and thus frames his perception of what is missing in Caillebotte’s paintings. Les raboteurs de parquet (Plate 1) captures three

 Between Caillebotte and Zola 129 floor scrapers in the middle of their work of planing the floor of the room that was to become Caillebotte’s studio. The two foreground workers brace their wiry and halfnaked bodies against their planers and the floor, pressing into the wood as they move in our direction. In the background, the third raboteur unsteadily leans forward to pick up a tool from the floor with his outstretched right hand. A soft and diffused light passes through the rear window, only the lower portion of which is rendered visible on account of the raised horizon, and reflects off both the unplaned floor and the backs of the raboteurs with a high sheen. The opened bottle of wine and the conversational inclination of the heads of the two foreground floor scrapers offer hints of a workplace sociability typical of the Parisian working class.55 For Michael Marrinan and Marnin Young this painting is primarily concerned with possession: they argue that Caillebotte is here staking a claim to bourgeois mastery over property, over Paris and over his class inferiors by ruthlessly deforming spaces and bodies, rendering everything up as a spectacular visual feast for the all-consuming bourgeois eye.56 Tamar Garb likewise reads this painting in relation to Caillebotte’s fractured relation to his own class heritage: in her essay on ‘Gustave Caillebotte’s Male Figures’, she identifies a persistent engagement with the norms and codes of haut bourgeois masculinity.57 Drawing from Robert Nye’s seminal Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor, Garb identifies a cultural context in which the public performance of one’s masculinity was an essential component of being a social actor, especially following France’s emasculating humiliation at the hands of Prussia.58 She argues that the standards of bourgeois masculinity against which Caillebotte was measuring himself were themselves structured as a series of psychic defences against castration anxiety, conditioned by the fear that their social power might prove fragile and illusory. She identifies in Caillebotte’s depictions of working men the traces of a profound sympathy that makes manifest an oscillation between self and other, a desire for intersubjectivity frustrated by the chasm of class difference. However, in Garb’s account, Caillebotte’s insistent need to craft a vision of coherent masculinity is the driving force behind his depictions of working men: his class heritage is significant insofar as it impinges upon the expectations of his gender performativity. Garb rightly identifies the cracks and fissures in Caillebotte’s attempts to formulate a bourgeois male subjectivity (which are borne out in the cool ambivalence of his portraits and self-portraits), however seems too willing to accept that Caillebotte is successful in constituting the bodies of working men as its salve and antidote, as a model of paradigmatic wholeness. That a significant factor in Caillebotte’s identification with working men pertained to how it facilitated a certain fantasy of self, a phantasmic ‘worker’ identity paradoxically enabled by the material prosperity and class privilege from which he was trying to escape, is conceivable. However, the presumption of his discovery of workers as an unproblematic alter-ego underplays the ambivalences evident in these paintings. Michael Fried understands Les raboteurs de parquet as evidence for Caillebotte’s attempts to recover ‘a certain realism of the body’ while remaining within the ocular-centred remit of Manet and the Impressionists. Caillebotte’s ‘materialist Impressionism’ is, for Fried, achieved through combining attention to effects of light

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which dazzle the eye and perspectival contrivances which arouse an eminently bodily feeling of vertigo.59 It is in this framework that Fried sees Caillebotte as producing a variety of bodies caught in states of absorptive closure, a ‘corporeal Impressionism’ of phenomenological orientation.60 This crucial insight regarding the painting’s seemingly unresolved oscillation between ocular and corporeal registers deserves attention. Caillebotte’s nascent studio is illuminated by a soft light which appears to change temperature as it passes through the single window, shifting from warmer orange-cream to cooler, clearer tones. This light, as it reflects off the unplaned floor and off the backs of the floor scrapers, gives to both a sheen that simultaneously delineates and equates them; in picking out the components of the room, its undifferentiated diffusion treats tools, materials and bodies with equal dispassion. Skin is given no special treatment and is made to blend with the floor, with both surfaces projecting pools of clear, white light. Like a canvas stretched across its support, the skin of the floor scrapers seems to have no real thickness or materiality of its own: ribs, elbows, tendons and muscles protrude and stretch skin, where light appears to seal it. It is only through skin that we have access to the bodies of the floor scrapers, skin which operates as a boundary permeable only to the eye, precluding corporeal or affective excess; the body is wrapped up in and contained by light. Indeed, the bodies of the floor scrapers themselves preclude any notion of indulgent or sensual excess: they are taut, lean and wiry, built with a utilitarian disdain for waste. These are bodies hardened, shaped and moulded by their quotidian trade, as a cliff is continually worn down by the ravages of the tide so too are these floor scrapers planed down as they plane. Another version of Les raboteurs de parquet, which was painted the following year and shares its name, can be read as an insight into an earlier moment.61 Just as the floor has been less worked in the later image, so too have the bodies: the topless adolescent in the background is noticeably plump and soft, whereas the adult in the foreground has yet to have worked up the sweat sufficient to warrant his own undressing. If the largely intact floor indexes a scene of labour only just beginning, it is labour of a reflexive nature, work (not yet) done both by and to the bodies of the floor scrapers. The sheen and gloss of diffused light as it reflects and refracts around the room, then, offers a readily consumable visual spectacle of labour, untroubled by bodily excess or affect. Zola too, in L’Assommoir, was attentive to the effects of light in his descriptions of the spaces, objects and bodies of work.62 Zola’s production of work as something that is visually consumed, in addition to this thematization of the effects of light, therefore places the emphasis on the quasi-immaterial phenomenon of light, which comes to supersede work’s physical and material epiphenomena as the medium through which it is rendered sensible and registered symbolically. Goujet, at his forge, for example, at the moment where the sheer physical effort of bracing himself to swing down his hammer causes his ‘muscles [to] swell into mounds of flesh that rippled and hardened under the skin; his shoulders, his chest and his neck expanded’, starts to glow, transmutating into a source of divine light, the light of ‘a god’ precisely in its transcendence of physicality.63 At exactly the moment when the body at work would seem to be at its most physical, stimulating Gervaise’s desire (and Goujet’s desire to

 Between Caillebotte and Zola 131 be desired) in a bodily register, it is made ocular and insubstantial. Through work the body becomes light and is sanitized. The absence of light, or more precisely sheen, could likewise be a powerful signifier of this complex ideology of work. At a key moment in the narrative of Gervaise’s downfall, Zola describes her slavish obedience towards Virginie who, ‘with pursed lips’ commands her to ‘scrub’ the floor of the store Gervaise once owned.64 Although she, like Caillebotte’s raboteurs, kneels ‘on the floor’ and works at its transformation by way of the rhythmic oscillation of a tool upon its surface, her body – ‘hunched right over, with her shoulder-blades poking out and her arms purple and rigid [… looking] like a heap of something rather dirty, with … her bulging flesh visible through the holes in her bodice, a mass of flab that rippled, rolled and twitched under the vigour of her scrubbing’ – is at a far remove from the taught and clearly delineated torsos of the raboteurs.65 Lantier’s sententious exhortation that ‘the more elbow grease you put into it, the more it shines’ aligns successful labour with the visual effect of reflected light.66 A floor covered in a ‘black mud’ – black because it absorbs light and thus does not shine – signifies Gervaise’s failure: a failure matched in the complete inability of light (as an index of visual signification itself), to securely contain Gervaise’s body, a ‘mass of flab’ that ‘twitches’. Across both L’Assommoir and Les raboteurs de parquet, therefore, there is a spectrum wherein the visual effect of reflected light signifies work as a process done to and by the body, one that, when successful, contains and sanitizes the body and, when unsuccessful, unleashes the real materiality of the body beyond the pale of signification.67 Concomitant with this strategic deployment of diffused and reflected light to delineate and contain the body behind a sheen-like screen, distancing them behind an overall dazzle that Zola would compare to glass, is a more profound attempt on the part of the artist to identify with his subject. The extreme tilt of the floor, exacerbated by a high-vantage point and elevated horizon line, confounds expected perspectival recession; more than empowering the viewer, or indulging in a fantasy of specular power as Young and Marrinan suggest, Caillebotte’s experimental gambit works to visually fuse the surfaces of the floor and of the picture, juxtaposing and combining the labour of the artist with the labour of the raboteurs in a saturated double surface.68 At the bottom right of the painting, where the floor pitches up most drastically, Caillebotte writes his signature, the most obvious symbolic surrogate for self, as if it were inscribed on the floor ready to be planed away. This identification on the basis of shared labour was necessarily analogous, drawing on the fact that both painter and floor scraper work with their hands and tools to transform a surface. Caillebotte’s studious vision lingers on the specific tools of the trade, the characteristic physiognomy of its practitioners, their pose and their sociability. In the case of the two floor scrapers in the foreground, the very physical strain of their work, the friction of planer against wood, the resistive force of the floor against the weight of an entire body transmitted by outstretched arms and tightly gripping hands, is rendered by Caillebotte almost entirely by the foreshortening of their torsos. Thus, the physicality of their work is translated into painterly terms as a visual phenomenon; more than an effort to induce a bodily sense of vertigo, Caillebotte’s experimental and idiosyncratic manipulation of space highlights the work of the artist.

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What Caillebotte elides, or rather hopes to bridge, in this analogy are the very real microcosmic and macrocosmic inequalities of power and wealth that form the very conditions of the painting’s possibility. The paradoxes of Caillebotte’s investment in, and impossible identification with, the labour represented in the painting was certainly recognized at the time; contemporaneous caricatures played on the idea of Caillebotte projecting himself into his painting, parodying him as a millionaire floor scraper who produced an absurd self-identity through the act of painting (Figure 6.1). Encoded within the painting therefore, by what appear to be contrivances of a purely visual or formal nature – the unorthodox manipulation of perspective, vanishing point and horizon line – are signifiers of Caillebotte’s own labour: an attempt to bridge a chasm of class difference through a complex camaraderie of shared work and shared purpose, the production of a studio. However, the circuit of sociability that Caillebotte depicts between the two foreground floor scrapers is ambiguous and exclusive. Neither the painter nor the viewer is privy to the floor scrapers’ unfolding conversation. In carving out for themselves a shared and class-exclusive on-the-job sociability which frustrates both the dynamic of bourgeois power inherent in the selling of their labour to increase the value of the Caillebottes’ property and Caillebotte’s attempts to bridge this inequality, the raboteurs’ private conservation hints at the anxiety of mutual unintelligibility between classes that haunted the normative ideological forms of the Third Republic, and would be explored, as we have seen, in Caillebotte’s street scenes.

Figure 6.1  Unknown, [Caricature of Les raboteurs de parquet], c. 1875.

 Between Caillebotte and Zola 133 Thus, despite their shared production of work as a visual spectacle, their strategic delineation of the body as a closed unit screened behind a veil of signification, often thematized as the dazzle of light diffused and reflected, it is Caillebotte’s attempts to draw parallels between his work and the work of the floor scrapers that causes Zola to identify in this painting a lack of temperament. Caillebotte, the millionaire floor scraper, problematized the clear division between the rational, thinking and artistically creative bourgeois subject of knowledge (whose mind was in control of the body) and the irrational, unthinking and automaton labourers, the object of this knowledge, slaves to bodily impulse. Caillebotte’s suspicion of the notion of bourgeois creative genius as it applied to understandings of work, critiqued by Zola in the language of temperament, was also, as Zola’s reference to Jeune homme à sa fenêtre identified, at the root of his idiosyncratic bourgeois portraits. Jeune homme à sa fenêtre (Figure 6.2), a painting that Zola disparaged, was on the contrary praised by his fellow naturalist writer Edmond Duranty in his La nouvelle peinture of 1876. Duranty read the painting as the naturalist portrait par excellence, a paradigmatic example of his maxim that ‘a back should reveal temperament, age, and social condition; a pair of hands should reveal the magistrate or merchant; a gesture should reveal the entire range of feeling. … Hands kept in pockets can be eloquent. … An atmosphere is created in every interior, likewise a personal character taken up among all the objects that fill it.’69 Caillebotte’s pseudo-portrait of his younger brother René, which plays on a sense of ambiguity and mystery, oscillates between light and shade, surface and depth, public and private, interior and exterior, masculine and feminine. Although René’s back is turned, the viewer is nevertheless invited into a matrix of gazes that extends through him to the woman in the street, signalling a potentially erotic imaginary-visual encounter experienced from the sanctity and security of the bourgeois interior. René’s pose and clothing reveal him to be a young bourgeois; the plush furnishing, which creeps into frame at the bottom right, contrasts with the cool and linear urban vista visible through the window, articulating his liminal yet ostensibly empowered and privileged position in both contexts. He stands with feet firmly planted, free to indulge in a specular fantasy of class possession over the Haussmannized neighbourhood (and the people within it). Caillebotte has here transposed the Romantic trope of existential yearning for the sublime into the context of Haussmanized Paris, which Michael Marrinan reads as conveying René’s restless, compulsive spirit and encoding the Caillebottes’ economic dependence on the real estate of Paris.70 In opposition to such notions of class empowerment, Tamar Garb reads Jeune homme à sa fenêtre as a profoundly defensive reaction to what Abigail SolomonGodeau famously termed the late nineteenth-century ‘crisis of masculinity’.71 Garb reads the figure of René as a tightly controlled projection of a defensive and phallic masculinity that leaves so little room for a ‘sense of a self ’ as to expel it from the body and banish it to a precariously feminized existence as a reflection framed in lace.72 Indeed, where the physical labour of the raboteurs has given them cause to remove their clothing and expose their bodies to the light, René’s pensive inactivity gives no such excuse for bodily display; where in the raboteurs light entering an interior

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Figure 6.2  Gustave Caillebotte, Jeune homme à sa fenêtre, 1875. 116 × 80 cm, oil on canvas. Private Collection, New York. through a window reflects off, and thus gives form to, the bodies of those that work, it is here absorbed by the dark clothing which adorns the idle, concealing René’s body behind an impenetrable wall of solid black pigment. René is thus bifurcated into a specular imago of subjectivity, identified by Garb in his reflection, and a statuesque but unrepresentable body. The deleterious effect of idleness on the body was likewise a major theme of L’Assommoir. For Zola’s working-class characters, a disdain for work was symptomatic of a more fundamental moral failing, one that was ruthlessly punished by bodily decay. Coupeau’s accident inculcated in him a ‘smouldering resentment against work’, from which developed the propensity for sexual and alcoholic excess that consumes both him and Gervaise by the end of the novel.73 At certain junctures too, the bourgeoisie come in for criticism by characters in the novel, who characterize them as exploiters and ‘parasite[s]’ who ‘[produce] nothing’, who ‘sent you to your death but they themselves hadn’t the guts to risk climbing a ladder, they just settled down comfortably by their fireside and didn’t give a damn what happened to the poor!’.74 This alignment of parasitical idleness with domestic comfort is thus a

 Between Caillebotte and Zola 135 central concern for both Zola and Caillebotte’s image of the bourgeoisie. Although René’s stoic and rigid bodily posture does not necessarily connote such comfort, the plush chair, upholstered in red, positioned to signify René having recently vacated it, gestures towards the objects of comfort synonymous with the bourgeois home. Bourgeois alienation and working-class animosity thus hinge upon a certain distance from hard work maintained by men like René. If work makes the worker, lack of work makes them lack: caught between pensive yearning and unearned respite, René is both fractured and unrepresentable, hidden yet exposed. What Zola reads as a failure to convey the temperament in the manner of painters from within the Naturalist school he considered himself to lead is in fact an exploration of a subjectivity itself alienated from the normative power the notion of temperament connotes. In Caillebotte’s other bourgeois portraits too he produces a sense of subjective alienation, an unease between his subjects and the objects of their possession, which are ostensibly designed for their comfort, and which ought to signify their prosperity and power. Caillebotte’s portraits are cool and formal, depicting the bourgeois men of his social milieu, uncomfortably dressed in the blue-black clothing proper to their station, inhabiting only uneasily the domestic interiors that ought to be their natural habitat. Caillebotte produced with ‘directness and immediacy … reserved and noncommittal’ individuals, harbingers of a disconcertingly modern subjectivity.75 Caillebotte’s Portrait de Monsieur R. (Figure 6.3) of 1877, for example, problematically feminizes his sitter, who sinks, sinuous and relaxed, into the stuffed and patterned sofa.

Figure 6.3  Gustave Caillebotte, Portrait de Monsieur R., 1877. 81 × 100 cm, oil on canvas. Private Collection.

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Figure 6.4  Gustave Caillebotte, Portrait de Georges Roman, 1879. 74.5 × 92.5 cm, oil on canvas. Private Collection © Comité Caillebotte, Paris. As Elizabeth Benjamin has identified, the bourgeois domestic interior, with its promise of comfort and intimacy, was fraught with the potential to negate masculine identity, since the feminizing allure of comfort had the potential to undo a carefully constructed image of masculine power.76 Georges Roman (Figure 6.4), in contrast, sits stiff and alert, confronting the viewer with a raw intensity. The gloom of the room, produced in thick, dark tones to match the sitter’s clothing, contrasts with the cool blue light diffused by the netting in front of the window. The face, strongly illuminated on its left, recedes into shadow rapidly, fracturing into two tonally distinct parts. For René, Monsieur R. and Georges Roman, the bourgeois interior, in so far as it was categorically distinct from the spaces of work, was all the more threatening for it. Separated from the fixing power of physical labour and surrounded by the luxury objects that crystallize their vicarious reliance on the labour of others, the idle bourgeois body is at risk of becoming passively feminized (Figure 6.3) – identifying too much with the luxury of its surroundings and losing its integrity as it is absorbed by plush furniture, visually appropriating its sinuosity and implied comfort – disconcertingly fractured (Figure 6.4) – alienated from comfort and respite, the container of a subjectivity illat-ease with itself and its object environment – or adopting a potentially moribund and impotent defensive position between the two (Plate 2). Caillebotte’s portraits thus expose the fault lines of bourgeois sociability and subjectivity.77 However, it is not only in the idle world of the bourgeois domestic interior that Caillebotte produces bodies distorted by tricks of perspective, consumed by the objects of their possession or ensconced in their suits: his portrait of the celebrated sinologist, Henri Cordier (Figure 6.5) likewise reveals the problems of bourgeois work. Cordier, professor at the Parisian École spéciale des langues orientales and perhaps best known for his Biblioteca Sinica of 1880 (a bibliography of European scholarship in China) and known to Caillebotte since childhood, is pictured hunched over a desk, absorbed

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Figure 6.5  Gustave Caillebotte, Henri Cordier, 1883. 65.0 × 81.5 cm, oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, RF 2729. in the process of writing, his eyes myopically squinting at his papers, which he draws towards himself with his left hand.78 He leans forward in his chair, supporting himself only partially by resting his forearms and shoulder on the edge and face of the desk. A sense of unbalance pervades the scene, as if we catch the sitter in the midst of a mental exertion so taxing and intense that he forgets his own body, if only for the decisive inspirational moment. This is an image of a specifically bourgeois form of work: intellectual toil whose only physical manifestation is the production of text. As we have seen, the effort to categorize intellectual work and place it in a hierarchy above physical labour, which was anchored in aesthetic discourse by the concept of temperament, was a key struggle in naturalizing class inequality by a division of labour between the mind and body. Caillebotte thus locates the action and ostensible meaning in a non-visual realm to which, through the indecipherable scribbles on the page, Cordier’s turned body and inscrutable expression, he denies us access.79 If Caillebotte is impressed by the scholarly and intellectual endeavour of his friend, the proliferation of objects that he includes to signify it, especially the books on the shelves (to the right and behind Cordier) and the papers and quills which compete for desk space with an ornamental lamp, nevertheless threaten to crowd Cordier out. They carry much of the meaning of the painting, identifying Cordier’s profession, position and standing. The repetitive, serialized and organized character of the books, their collation into volumes sharing cover design, colour and size recall the visualepistemological structure and clarity of Caillebotte’s stamp collection. However, Caillebotte inverts his typical visual practice of bulwarking and complementing the

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figure; it is as if Cordier (and thus the viewer) intrudes on their domain; in physically and symbolically propping-up Cordier, his objects merely reproduce Cordier’s dependence upon them. Cordier’s hunched and myopic body, squeezed uncomfortably into a shallow picture space and bisected by the edge of the picture frame, is thus unmade by both Caillebotte’s work and his own, his body insufficiently supported by its paraphernalia. For the bourgeois individual of Caillebotte’s pictorial universe, caught between the empty sociable landscape of his interiors and the suffocating object-laden environment of the office, both work and idleness could be alienating.80 The objects of the bourgeois interior, ostensibly designed to facilitate and bolster work and sociable leisure, always threatened to consume and invert proper subject–object relations. From René’s restless yearning, to the marital ennui of Intérieur, femme lisant (Figure 1.4) and the familial disquiet of Le Déjeuner (Figure 2.1), to Cordier’s uncomfortable strain, Caillebotte’s paintings of his bourgeois peers problematize the ideology of creative agency, of temperament, as the automatic and easy inheritance of the bourgeois class. At both extremes of Caillebotte’s painterly exploration of what it means for him to be a bourgeois who works at painting, he nevertheless pulls back from representing what Zola might think about as the smell of his subject. For Zola, despite the ostensible naturalist scrutiny to which Caillebotte subjects the bodies he paints, there is a troubling failure of fidelity to corporeal experience, to the body itself. Caillebotte insistently screens the brute and potentially nonsensical corporeal materiality behind surface effects of reflected light, perspectival structural contrivances and the smooth impenetrable surface of the bourgeois black suit. What unites Les raboteurs de parquet (Plate 1) and Jeune homme à sa fenêtre (Figure 6.2) in the context of his wider production, despite their ostensible differences, is Caillebotte’s interest in producing classed bodies on a spectrum between work and leisure, and his concomitant concern to ensure that this representation remains exclusively within the domain of the visible. However, the very same processes and techniques that function to produce the body as a visual spectacle (of absence or presence) are what makes it cohere as a recognizable whole, contra the fragmenting forces of work and desire that Zola finds so fascinating. Where the sheen of reflected light creates an impermeable surface, and perspectival foreshortening condenses bodily form, the space and process of work seems to exert a centripetal force that binds and sutures the bodies of the raboteurs. However, in Les raboteurs de parquet Caillebotte’s naturalist attention to detail, his careful amassing of studies from life, and his interest in drawing parallels between their profession and his own, produces passages wherein the body threatens to come apart, exhibits a potential resistance to the fixity of naturalist visual signification. In his preparation for Les raboteurs de parquet, Caillebotte devoted a great deal of time and energy to studying the floor scraper’s manual manipulation of their tools. Sometimes this manifested in views of male bodies kneeling and pushing their weight down through outstretched arms to terminate in the nexus defined by tightly gripping hands, the sharp edge of the planer, and the (sometimes implied) frictive resistance of the wooden floor. In one study (Trois Etudes pour des raboteurs: deux études de mains et une étude d’homme agenouillé de face, c. 1875), Caillebotte’s vision separates the hand

 Between Caillebotte and Zola 139 from the force of the rest of the body; juxtaposed in duplicate as fragments, the motif of the hand gripping a tool is thickly and un-naturalistically built up in graphite. The intensely dark tone of the hands encodes Caillebotte’s labour of drawing as it represents the labour of floor-scraping, condensing both in a saturated double-locus. We have seen how, in Rue de Paris; temps de pluie, Caillebotte examined the public object-driven performance of class by repeating the singular motif of the hand gripping an umbrella across a canvas, and how this resulted in studies whereby the fragmented hand was juxtaposed with a whole figure. Tamar Garb likewise understands the importance of the motif of the hand in Les raboteurs de parquet, and in the later Peintres en bâtiment, the studies for which exhibit the same repeated engagement with the motif, in terms of Caillebotte’s subjective identification with the workers he depicts.81 In the final canvas, this unerring and potentially fragmenting focus on a characteristic part-object was instead leveraged as a force for amalgamation. Although Caillebotte deploys the same kind of tonal darkening, especially with the foremost two floor scrapers (Plate 1), their tense hands and outstretched arms braced against the resistive force of the floor erect a visual axis of force which runs along the angle of the planers, up their arms and through their bodies. These lines of force are oriented with the perspectival recessions and the gaps in the floorboards such that the deforming spatial inconsistencies produced by the elevated viewpoint and horizon line further contribute to this compression of bodies, their implosive deformation. While arms stretch and extend, bodies are compressed and foreshortened. As we have seen, Zola typically veiled the propensity of work to fragment the body into its constituent and desirable part-objects behind a veil of naturalist signification in such a way as to prevent the disturbing intrusion of its brute and real materiality. However, as the narrative of the novel progresses and the bodies of Zola’s characters are worn down by their labours (their ‘confining, mechanical occupation had made them dull and unbending like worn-out tools’), the symbolic cordon sanitaire which had earlier kept them from us becomes momentarily permeable.82 As Gervaise sinks into moral depravity, her increasingly humiliating work is described in a way reminiscent of the visual display which had, earlier in the novel, sparked sexual desire: ‘Her old skirt was soaked and clung to her buttocks. There on the floor she looked like a heap of something rather dirty, with her hair all tousled and her bulging flesh visible through the holes in her bodice, a mass of flab that rippled, rolled and twitched under the vigour of her scrubbing.’83 Gervaise’s body, indexing her gluttony, idleness and alienation from the normative symbolic Law (the bourgeois morality of hard work), is punished in kind. Gervaise degrades into a disgusting fatty, twitching sludge. Zola presents the body in its visceral materiality, paired back to its real biological kernel, that nonsensical remainder which it continues to be beyond subjectivity. At the apogee of her degradation and alienation from the world of wholesome and fulfilling work, Gervaise (unsuccessfully) resorts to walking the streets in order to provide for herself.84 This charged moment, in which the commodification of the body in its most explicit aspect makes contact with the contempt heaped upon a body made undesirable by degrading and deforming work, proves to be too much for Zola’s naturalist language.85 Zola makes a sudden shift away from Gervaise’s body precisely

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at the moment where the reader would expect him to dwell upon it (as he does at countless other junctures in the novel). The grotesque commodity of Gervaise’s body is only indirectly described by reference to its shadow, a lateral shift which attempts to mitigate the psychological power of a body unrestrained by its alienation from language.86 Gervaise can only repeat ‘Excuse me, Sir’, over and over.87 Elsewhere in the novel too – notably Gervaise’s death-fantasy of the undertaker’s assistant Bazouge carrying her away, and her fantasy of self-annihilation by way of the assommoir’s ‘fire’ and ‘poison’ – Zola is caught between the capacity of language (empowered by its scientific and visually descriptive objectivity) to classify and fix social relations, and its inadequacy to express the limit-cases of psychological experience, where the (experience of the) body becomes unsignifiable.88 In L’Assommoir, therefore, if not sublimated through work, desire collapses into corporeal annihilation at once symbolic, psychic and material. For Caillebotte, however, it is only in moving beyond work that the body is made desirable: desirable, yet unfixed. Nu au divan (Plate 7) from around 1880 represents a naked, slender young woman with dark blonde, neatly coiffed hair, lying on an oversized and florally patterned sofa. The model, Charlotte Berthier, would become Caillebotte’s romantic and sexual partner, his cohabiter in Petit Gennevilliers and beneficiary of a life annuity in Caillebotte’s will (see Figure 2.4). With her gaze remaining inside the picture frame, she folds her raised left arm across her shadowy upper face and with the extended fingers of her right hand plays with the nipple of her left breast; her feet show the tension of this auto-erotic pleasure. Her torso bears the marks of a recently removed waistband, evidence compounded by the roughly depicted pile of clothes resting on the arm of the sofa. Her hands are rough and ruddy, the soles of her feet worn and tarnished, her toes cramped and squashed as if they have just been eased out of her boots, which are positioned in the foreground of the painting, facing the sofa. Her pubic hair is frankly depicted, covering her genitals, and armpit hair is hinted at. Michael Fried has drawn a line of connection between this image and Le Déjeuner, making the case that in both images it is Caillebotte’s intention to render accessible to his viewers a certain kind of bodily absorption.89 However, I would go further than Fried and argue that it is only through the auto-erotic action of the figure’s right hand which, draped across her body, seems to play with her left nipple, that Caillebotte makes clear both the inwardness of this absorption, and that it is a primarily corporeal, rather than psychological, closure. The figure’s hand is bracketed by her genitals and face, all three arranged along a single linear axis, amplifying its significatory potential; her impassive expression and closed eyes block identification, while her pubic hair arrests the dynamics of straightforward ocular libidinal voyeuristic consumption. This intimate vision of a kind of pure and holistic inward-looking corporeal experience, a closed loop of auto-erotic sexuality, is made possible by, on the one hand, this very ambiguity of its relationship to fixed narrative or naturalist space-time and, on the other, the overdetermined and saturated (symbolically, tonally, materially) right hand of the figure that bears the weight of narrative signification and condenses the entire scene of bodily absorption. However, Caillebotte depicts the hand of the figure in an un-naturalistically dark colour so that it seems out of place with the rest of the body. Its fingers are built up

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Figure 6.6  Gustave Caillebotte, Study for Nu au divan, 1882. 47 × 60, charcoal on paper. Private Collection © Comité Caillebotte, Paris. of dark reds, purples, greys and blues which make a sharp contrast to both the rather pale flesh tones in which the rest of the figure is produced, and the more reddish-pink tones of the nipple (Plate 7). They almost seem to be the fingers of another, dead, hand. A charcoal study (Figure 6.6) for the work doesn’t feature this darkening of the hand, which might suggest that it emerged in oil, during the work of painting, in the moment of Caillebotte’s physical relation to the canvas. In L’Assommoir, the work of the washerwomen leaves their skin ‘red’ and ‘steaming’; in Nu au divan, where work has (perhaps only temporarily) ceased (the uniform of the day lies discarded, nevertheless having left its marks on the body), reddened hands turn to the execution of another task.90 As if to counterbalance the vaginal void to which the viewer’s attention is drawn by the provocative tuft of pubic hair, Caillebotte renders the hand as a site of overdetermined materiality. What had, in other canvases, functioned as the locus of Caillebotte’s sympathetic and class-transgressive identification is here transformed by the weight of unrestrained desire. The viewer is presented not with a scene in which he is invited to play an active role but rather with the (more or less) realistically delineated materiality of a selfsufficient circuit of female desire and sexuality, condensed in, and symbolized by, the auto-erotic action of the hand. The hand at once demystifies feminine sexuality, brazenly asserts a monadic sexual relationship in the face of prevailing ideologies of gender which stressed female dependence on men, and yet is dehumanized, mortified and threatens putrefaction. However, this is not necessarily to say that the painting represents a bold manifesto on the part of Caillebotte; his hesitancy to exhibit the painting perhaps betrays an awareness of, and even an anxiety about, its capacity to shock.91 Homme au bain (Figure 6.7), painted around four years after Nu au divan in 1884, similarly offers a grimly captivating spectacle of the body fragmented, one whose partobjects invite a sexualized gaze, but whose inward-focused absorptive attention, while ostensibly signifying a psychical realm from which we are barred, pulls us back to a

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Figure 6.7  Gustave Caillebotte, Homme au bain, 1884. 166 × 125 cm, oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. sense of materiality and corporeal sensoria external to the fixity of naturalist (visual) signification and its correlate in work.92 Caillebotte captures a private and intimate post-ablution scene: a single nude man, seen from the rear, stands beside a bathtub, drying himself with a white towel. His feet, firmly planted on the ground, give his nude body a sturdiness that mirrors the pose adopted by René as he contemplates Haussmannized Paris. Indeed, the notion of psychical closure is at play here too: his face hidden, seemingly unaware of our presence, the man appears completely focused on the task of drying himself, unconcerned with the messy heap of clothes, or with his wet footprints, on the floor. However, where in Jeune homme à sa fenêtre (Figure 6.2), psychic closure was facilitated by a concealing of the body, Caillebotte here, as in Nu au divan, makes of it a brazen display. He dwells on the muscle, skin and sinew of the male nude, transcribing the tension of his Achilles tendons and calves, the rosy roughness of the skin of his buttocks and the muscularity of his arms. We are invited to focus on the physicality

 Between Caillebotte and Zola 143 of the man’s activity, the fact of his doing something to his body and his concomitant focus on this task. In accepting this invitation, as the eye moves around the body, picking out detail, the body is fragmented into its constituent part-objects. The specular imago of subjective wholeness, and the narcissistic fantasy it supports, necessarily break down in the sequential physical experience of the parts which make it up: the drying of a foot, then a leg, then, as pictured, a back. For the man who feels himself drying himself, the somatic experience is more closely related to the fragmented body of the pre-mirror stage infant than the imaginary illusion of wholeness supplied to it in the reflected image.93 Norma Broude argues that Homme au bain (Figure 6.7) and the related Homme s’essuyant la jambe constituted deliberate inversions of the prototypical avant-garde female bather as produced by Degas. For Broude, Caillebotte’s paintings feminized the male body in ways that were read at the time as dangerously homoerotic.94 Where the paradigmatic image of the bourgeois male body was one bounded and totalized by the impermeable boarders of the black suit, wherein masculine phallic authority rested precipitously on the body’s performance of its own unitary completeness, Caillebotte’s nudes lack this aura of impermeability; brazenly displayed buttocks and genitals make the body penetrable by the gaze, Caillebotte’s attention to physical rubbing demonstrate the skin to be permeable to sensation.95 It was thus only in his late nudes that Caillebotte approaches the grimly compelling spectacle of the body’s breakdown that had so fascinated Zola. In these paintings Caillebotte moves beyond the remit of work – in which he had invested his hopes of subjective re-articulation and a sympathy born of identification – to the terrain of desire, in which fragmenting potential of bodily activity and attention finds no counterbalance in the fixing power of labour. If, as Duranty supposed, a back revealed temperament, here, partially concealed by the towel, the ridge of the spine carries the eye down towards the buttocks, an anal void of which we are given a ‘startlingly direct view’ and wherein the phallic mastery of bourgeois masculinity’s normative force, temperament itself, is dissolved.96 A curtain discreetly covers the window, blocking out the sanitizing light that may well have put everything back together. The undecidability of Caillebotte’s ostensibly unresolved oscillation between the phenomenological and the ocular was a consequence of his Zolian desire to understand the truth of the working experience (and not, as has been suggested, a more straightforward question of his split formal-aesthetic loyalties to either Realism or Impressionism). This desire necessarily decayed into the duality of the fragmenting problematic of class difference and its inverse in the suturing potentiality of work. A certain working corporeality is thus central to Caillebotte’s representations of working men, but is accessible only as a stain, covered over by (or, more precisely, encoded within) the complex perspectival contrivances and visual dazzle that Zola was to read as a problematic, bourgeois and photographic visual clarity. Caillebotte’s personal investment in the power of work to make and remake both bodies and subject positions was, for Zola, completely incomprehensible. As we have seen, in L’Assommoir, both the presence and absence of work exist in an antagonistic relationship to the body, degrading it and corrupting it. Moreover, Zola’s writing of work as a brute mechanical

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process, with no room for the execution of creativity or subjectivity, in a naturalist significatory method whereby the potential for bodily excess is policed and contained by the fixing power of language, could not find a way to express Caillebotte’s subtle movements between subject and object, process and result. For Zola, class identity operates as a natural given, wrapped up in the hierarchization of social forms, which is made to inhere in bodies by the punishing regimen of work; for Caillebotte, as he would demonstrate so forcefully in his late self-portrait Régates à Argenteuil (Plate 3), work is precisely the way out of the bind of class.

Part 4

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Working as Caillebotte in Petit Gennevilliers

I am doing a Stanopea Aurea which has been in flower since this morning and as the flower only lasts three or four days and will not bloom again for another year[.] I cannot leave it. Present my apologies to Mirbeau.1 Gustave Caillebotte, 1890 On 21 February 1894, aged forty-five, Gustave Caillebotte died suddenly of a stroke at home in Petit Gennevilliers. He was buried five days later, at midday on 26 February, in a well-attended ceremony held at Notre-Dame-de-Lorette in Paris and officiated by his half-brother Alfred, curé of that church.2 The sentiment expressed in Camille Pissarro’s oft-quoted lament for Caillebotte, contained within a letter sent to his son – ‘Now here’s one we can really mourn, he was good and generous, and a painter of talent to boot’ – was not matched in the public response to the retrospective of Caillebotte’s paintings held by Durand-Ruel, at which they were received as ‘curious remnant[s] of a past epoch’.3 This muted reception has typically been taken as symptomatic of Caillebotte’s slackened ambition and derivative manner after 1882 – his failure to ensure that his painterly idiom was up to date – which resulted in his falling out of the public consciousness, and therefore public favour.4 When Durand-Ruel featured some of Caillebotte’s canvases in a small group show in 1888, Caillebotte’s ‘fields, gardens, [and] boaters’ were characterized as ‘works of a tired and outdated Impressionism’.5 Was Caillebotte’s rather rapid descent into posthumous obscurity a result of the diminished quality and quantity of the painterly output of his later years? Had Caillebotte, as Gustave Geffroy reported in his obituary published in Le Journal, ‘forsaken’ painting?6 That Caillebotte’s public persona had diminished is certainly true; aside from a few one-off exhibitions in which he was a comparatively minor (and critically unappreciated) component, Caillebotte’s last major public showing was the Seventh Impressionist Exhibition of 1882. Yet, Caillebotte certainly never forgot painting. Indeed, he died leaving canvases, one of which has been identified by Marina Ferretti Bocquillon as Parterre de marguerites (Figure 7.1), unfinished.7 What does Caillebotte’s ultimate project, his destination, retroactively reveal about the trajectory of his career? Parterre de marguerites is made up of four panels and represents a flower bed of daisies. The extreme close-up perspective of the paintings functions both to flatten pictorial space, elevating the flowers and their green field essentially parallel to the

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Figure 7.1  Gustave Caillebotte, Parterre de marguerites, c. 1892–3. Four decorative panels each 100 × 50.3 cm, oil on canvas. Giverny, musée des impressionnismes, acquis grâce à la générosité de la Caisse des Dépôts, de la Caisse d’Epargne Normandie, de SNCF Réseau, de la Société des amis du musée des impressionnismes Giverny et d’une souscription publique, 2016 , inv. MDIG 2016.2.1 à 4. © Giverny, musée des impressionnismes.

Figure 7.2  Gustave Caillebotte, Capucines, 1892. 65 × 54 cm, oil on canvas. Private Collection © Comité Caillebotte, Paris. picture surface, and to decontextualize the scene from the garden setting implied by its title in such a way as to connote a decorative register. Indeed, as Bocquillon notes, the four panels that comprise Parterre de marguerites were intended by Caillebotte to adorn the walls of his Petit Gennevilliers dining room, complementing other decorative panels of capucines (Figure 7.2) and orchidées (Figure 7.3).8 As with his treatment of daisies, Caillebotte’s nasturtiums (Figure 7.2) are decontextualized, removed from clearly

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Figure 7.3  Gustave Caillebotte, Orchidées (cattleya et anturium), 1893. 108 × 42 cm, oil on canvas. Private Collection © Comité Caillebotte, Paris. delineated space and placed on an almost unmodulated and monochromatic field: flattened and abstracted. Caillebotte’s looseness of touch simultaneously schematizes and simplifies the individual flowers into assemblages of individual brushstrokes, and calls attention to the rough materiality of the painted object. Although his orchidées (Figure 7.3) are shown in perspectival space designed to offer a kind of tromp l’oeil effect when, as Caillebotte had intended, installed the four panels on the door of the dining room, Caillebotte nevertheless enlarged and emphasized the foreground, the dense vegetation of which mirrors the flattened fields of his other works. Gloria Groom has drawn a comparison between Caillebotte’s flower paintings and Claude Monet’s Nymphéas, noting that both artists drew inspiration for their decorative flower paintings from the gardens they had each created.9 The flattened field of Caillebotte’s painting ostensibly matches that produced by the elevated and oblique viewpoint of Monet’s water lilies, with both offering an abstracting and decontextualized vision of a specific floral element drawn from their own gardens.10 Similarly, the decorative purpose of Caillebotte’s project may well have taken for its model the multiple panneaux that Monet had painted around 1883 for the salon of his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. As the extant letters between Caillebotte and Monet on the subject attest, their close friendship in the 1880s and 1890s was cemented and animated primarily by their shared interests in gardening and boating.11 As Marie Berhaut notes, Monet would often write to Caillebotte with questions about his garden and about flowers, especially during his time in Giverny between 1891 and 1893.12 These letters tend to adopt an informational and logistical air, concerned primarily with the practicalities of cultivating a flower garden and with exchanging horticultural knowledge and specimens, rather than the poetic or aesthetic effect of the garden itself.13 According to Jean-Pierre Hoschedé, it was Caillebotte who, when Monet was living in Argenteuil between 1871 and 1878, converted him to the charms of the horticultural;

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and, after Monet’s move to Giverny in 1883, according to Stephan Gwynn, Caillebotte was instrumental in the planning and laying out of the new garden.14 For John House, the Impressionist garden was primarily an ‘imaginative space’ that fostered artistic experimentation.15 When Monet moved to Giverny in June 1883, he almost immediately began setting out a flower garden in the grounds close to the house. Dominated by agapanthus, day lily and iris, the rectangular garden featured a central aisle bounded by trellises and mixed flower beds.16 Gradually, the garden’s flowers became an increasingly visible presence in Monet’s paintings. In the early 1890s Monet had the idea for a water garden, located further from the house, beyond the flowers. In a letter dated 17 July 1893 Monet requested permission from the local Préfet to construct a water garden featuring water lilies, irises and reeds ‘merely intended for leisure and to delight the eye and also to provide motifs to paint’.17 When completed, Monet’s two gardens offered him the imaginative freedom and aesthetic inspiration for a radical development in his painterly style. Over the course of the 1880s Monet had moved away from the preoccupation with describing ‘specifically modern subjects’ that had characterized his work in the 1870s, instead becoming fascinated with landscapes that showcased the ephemerality and transitory nature of light, attempting to capture the totalizing envelope of air itself with an increasingly nondescriptive touch.18 For House, Monet’s series of Nymphéas was the culmination of this movement towards an abstract and decorative visualization of light itself; indeed, to capture light as it shimmered and shifted in the mirror-surface of the pond was the very goal of Monet’s water lilies, both in reality and in painting. ‘The water flowers are far from being the whole scene,’ Monet wrote, ‘really they are just the accompaniment. The essence of the motif is the mirror of the water whose appearance alters at every moment, thanks to the patches of sky which are reflected in it, and which give it its light and movement.’19 It should be noted, however, that Monet did not necessarily conceive of or create his gardens with the express purpose of this neat integration with his painting; his contrary claim to the Préfet de l’Eure was, I would suggest, a strategic move designed to remind his interlocutor of his celebrity status and thus secure the necessary permissions for its creation. Indeed, Monet later admitted that ‘it took me some time to understand my water lilies. I had planted them for pleasure; I cultivated them without thinking of painting them. … A landscape does not sink in to you all at once.’20 Monet’s gardens were first and foremost a space for leisure and for aesthetic pleasure, a domain of freedom and of fantasy, whose painterly appeal developed only ex post facto.21 This delay is evident in his oeuvre: the very earliest examples of water lilies by Monet’s hand date from 1897 to 1898, half a decade after the instillation of the garden, and it was not until the twentieth century that the motif became his primary concern. The mythos of Giverny as the painter’s garden par excellence was cultivated only slowly. Given their sociable closeness and shared interest in gardening, and given the ostensible formal similarities between their flattened, schematized, abstracted and decontextualized paintings of the flowers in their gardens, must we then read Caillebotte’s late work as symptomatic of a conversion to Monet’s aesthetic tenets? Can we think of this period in Caillebotte’s career as a conversion or capitulation to the terms

 Working as Caillebotte in Petit Gennevilliers 151 of Monet’s project, oriented primarily towards the capture of light and the resolution of pictorial problems? Has Caillebotte abandoned his psychologically, socially and ideologically engaged practice in favour of producing more self-contained works of ‘Art’ concerned with representation per se? Has Caillebotte internalized Émile Zola’s 1875 critique and reoriented his practice towards representing nature filtered through the prism of his temperament? Has Caillebotte, after 1882, abandoned his fascination with, and dependence upon, work – his contact with and sympathy for working men – preferring instead to cloister himself in a self-contained space of leisure, aesthetic pleasure and flights of fantasy, producing paintings to match? What conclusions can we draw about Caillebotte’s earlier paintings, especially his paintings of work, if we view what follows as a repudiation of their very terms? To be sure, as we saw vis-à-vis his 1877 Parisian street scenes, Caillebotte was always willing to experiment and innovate pictorially, to set and attempt to resolve the problematics specific to representing real space on a flat support, that is, problems specific to painting.22 However, as I have argued extensively, he did so with a view to resolving anxieties and imperatives that originated and were experienced outside the domain of painting, and drew a significant proportion of his innovative methods from an extra-painterly source, the visuality of the stamp album and the psycho-symbolic dynamics of collecting. Running counter to the consensus view of Caillebotte as having reoriented his painterly practice completely towards Monet’s increasingly decorative search for light’s constitutional ephemerality, I instead suggest that Caillebotte’s quasi-abstracted flower paintings are in fact perfectly in line with the desires, anxieties and processes I have been tracing over the course of this book. They are symptomatic of Caillebotte’s attachment to the dynamics of work and collecting, mediated by his relocation to Petit Gennevilliers, a space altogether more malleable than the complex, potentially antagonistic, maelstrom of Paris. It is not that Caillebotte was ignorant of, or hostile to, Monet’s painterly aesthetic, nor that he had never exhibited an interest in the motifs and effects that had transfixed, or would come to transfix, his close friend – paintings of weather effects (L’Yerres, effet de pluie, 1875), grainstacks (Paysage aux meules, 1872–8) and water lilies (Nymphéas sur l’étang, 1872–8) would clearly contradict this notion – but rather that, despite his awareness of and sympathy for Monet’s work, what Caillebotte expected his own painting to do was quite different. To trace the genealogy of Caillebotte’s gardens in the context of his wider life and work is also to retrace the development of this book, to demonstrate and underscore its argumentative thrust and to begin to understand the ultimate form of Caillebotte’s labours. The first gardens with which Caillebotte would have been familiar were those of his family’s summer estate in Yerres. On 12 May 1860, Caillebotte’s father Martial purchased a vast property (of over 11 hectares) located at 6 rue de Concy in the town of Yerres, about 18 kilometres from the centre of Paris.23 The young Gustave spent numerous summers there before it was eventually sold in 1878 following the deaths of both Martial père and Céleste.24 Taking the shape of a large rectangle and laid out in the English style with local and imported trees, flower beds, paths and lawns, the still extant Yerres garden is bounded on one side by the Yerres river, over which two

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bridges run; at one end is the main house, an Italianate Casin, flanked by pavilions, an orangery, lakes, a greenhouse and a gardener’s lodge. Further into the garden, atop a small hill, opposite the stretch of the river, is situated a kiosk and glacière for supplying the house with ice. At the opposite edge of the estate to the house is a vegetable garden with trellised walls.25 Despite being occupied with his legal studies, the gardens in Yerres nevertheless loomed large in Caillebotte’s immediate visual context; they offered him the physical and mental space, not to mention the motifs, that would be crucial in the development of his early work. As Pierre Wittmer identified: ‘The shapes of these gardens with their architectural features made an ineradicable mark on his aesthetic formation, awoke him to art, and stimulated his creative gifts.’26 Many of his early paintings were set in Yerres and showcased its gardens.27 However, these paintings, far from indulging in the pleasurable fantasy of freedom integral to the mythos of the artist’s garden, instead produce the garden as a space of work and a locus of ordering, a site for the display of labouring bodies and the fruits of their toil. In 1877, the same year in which he exhibited his philatelic Parisian street scenes, Caillebotte painted the family’s gardeners at work in the jardin potager at Yerres (Plate 7). In a clearly defined space, bounded by two trellised whitewashed walls that meet just off-centre, Caillebotte depicts the ordered and orderly world of the vegetable garden. Two gardeners, each carrying watering cans, are dressed in matching outfits: straw-hat, blue overalls, white top and bare feet. While the gardener closest to the viewer concentrates on watering the plants immediately before him, his colleague moves towards him, slowly and with short steps, burdened with the weight of his own watering cans, his arms straining and back stiffly vertical. Les Jardiniers has much in common with Les raboteurs de parquet (Plate 1), painted only two years earlier. Both paintings depict a moment of work in a space owned by Caillebotte’s father, enacted by men in a clearly defined position subservient to their employer. In each painting, Caillebotte’s sharp and inquisitive gaze, his attention to detail, is ultimately frustrated by an implied exclusive sociability borne from a shared work experience. In both paintings, Caillebotte articulates a delimited and defined space in which work can take place, that is nevertheless idiosyncratic in its perspectival constitution. Caillebotte emphasizes the repeated linearity of the motif (partially planed floorboards; plants, cloches, and poplar trees) to draw the eye into a complex and off-centred recessional space, that nonetheless retains a certain emphasis (stronger in Les raboteurs de parquet than in Les Jardiniers) on the foreground. As we have seen, in Les raboteurs de parquet Caillebotte undertook to resolve and articulate his own identity as a worker by focusing on a type of labour whose index was the material transformation of a surface. Likewise, in Les Jardiniers it is the dampened soil that visually indexes the labour of the gardeners, materializing their hard, bodily labour as a chromatic transformation akin to painting. Even in paintings of his friends and family ostensibly enjoying the grounds of his family’s Yerres estate – such as Le Parc de la propriété Caillebotte à Yerres (1875), which depicts, perhaps, one of Caillebotte’s cousins: Zoé or Charles; Les Orangers, in which Martial sits before the Casin, shaded by orange trees and with a view of a large flower

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Figure 7.4  Gustave Caillebotte, Portraits à la campagne, 1876. 95 × 111 cm, oil on canvas. Collection du MAHB Bayeux. Photo: Bayeux – MAHB / Photo Mathieu Ferrier. bed, absorbed in reading a newspaper as if completely unaware that Zoé stands metres away, herself reading a letter; and Portraits à la campagne (Figure 7.4) in which, set again in the shadow of the Casin, Caillebotte paints his cousin Marie, family-friend Madame Hue and his aunt Madame Charles Caillebotte intently engaged in their needlework, while his mother reads – the dearth of meaningful interaction, the absorption of each figure exclusively on their task or their thoughts, draws a veil of silence that hovers uncomfortably somewhere between companionable and hostile.28 While Caillebotte – in paintings of L’Yerres, effet de lumière (1872–8) and Allee dans le parc, Yerres (1872–8) – was nevertheless careful also to capture the aesthetic delights of his family’s Yerres estate, the subtle play of light and shade offered by its numerous trees and buildings, the large flower beds that offered a riot of chromatic vibrancy, the warmth of a summer’s midday, paintings like Portraits à la campagne – just as in his Parisian paintings like Jeune homme au piano (Figure 0.1) and Madame Boissière tricotant (Figure 0.2) – and Les Jardiniers – as Les raboteurs de parquet – nevertheless articulate the Yerres gardens as spaces where employees worked and employers worked at leisure. Around this time too, Caillebotte produced two sketches of the nearby municipal laundry: one an exterior view from across the river, the second an interior.29 The first of these was perhaps a study for the background of a périssoire scene, in which the adjoined

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public laundry, baths and watering troughs appear from among the trees.30 The second drawing is dominated by an off-centre perspectival armature redolent of Caillebotte’s philatelic street scenes exhibited in 1877, within which rows of washerwomen toil over their work; although schematically delineated, their hunched physiognomy is a readily legible contrast to the linear thrust of the space itself. The drawing doesn’t seem to have been worked up into a finished painting, and Michael Marrinan speculates that it could be a remnant of an abortive project to expand his catalogue of working types to laundresses, a fashionable motif for those with naturalist impulses.31 It could be possible that Caillebotte was spurred on by Émile Zola’s harsh critique of his showing at the 1876 Impressionist Exhibition; in the same breath as damning the bourgeois exactitude of Caillebotte’s floor scrapers, Zola had exulted Degas’s Blanchisseuses, while his own take on the theme (L’Assommoir) was being serialized in the press. Perhaps, the Yerres washerwomen offered Caillebotte an opportunity to confront Zola on his own terrain without sacrificing his personal, underlying goals and techniques. In any event, a rhetoric of labour saturated Caillebotte’s visual experience of the spaces in and around his family’s Yerres gardens. The lasting legacy of the Yerres garden then rested in Caillebotte’s experience of it not only as a space of labour, or an amalgamation of various spaces produced by and conductive to various forms of labour-like activities, but also as a space in which these activities cohabited and cross-pollinated in ways that served, paradoxically, both to blur and solidify class difference. Caillebotte’s (sometimes too) precise and highly worked painterly vision marks no differentiation between bourgeois rentiers, who work at pleasure, and salaried gardeners or local washerwomen, who work out of necessity. When describing the activity of each, Caillebotte devotes studious attention to their absorbed mental concentration, the goods they produce and consume and the dynamic tension in their bodies as they stand, sit, manipulate needles, read a book, heft watering cans or scrub laundry. Caillebotte is careful to draw analogies between the physical and psychological mechanisms of bourgeois leisure and working-class labour in ways that bridge the class hierarchy by positing labour-like activities as a shared universal (in line with the Republican discourse on labour already examined). This shared universal, crucially, in making consumption indistinct from production, clouds the overarching structure of class difference within which Caillebotte was constantly working to situate himself. Yet, the concrete fact of class difference is irrepressible, and resurfaces in the sartorial and horticultural differences (decorative dresses and flowers opposed, for example, to utilitarian dungarees and vegetables) that are the ostensibly incidental trappings of the shared activity. The painter’s (unconscious) desire to transgress these categories of difference registers in his exclusion from each, as being ‘part of yet apart from’ these ‘different worlds’.32 On 7 May 1881 Gustave and Martial Caillebotte purchased a house in Petit Gennevilliers, about 9 kilometres from the centre of Paris. Gustave spent the next six years dividing his time between Paris and Petit Gennevilliers, before, on 24 May 1887, buying out Martial’s stake and moving to Petit Gennevilliers permanently. Caillebotte soon expanded the property on three sides (increasing its footprint from 5,359 m2 to 10,103 m2), embellished the house, constructed a studio in which he

 Working as Caillebotte in Petit Gennevilliers 155 painted and designed racing yachts, installed a large greenhouse and a Worthington pump to access Seine water.33 Like Yerres, this was a working garden, staffed by four permanent gardeners who laboured alongside Caillebotte himself, and had for its centrepiece the large greenhouse, ‘like an altar to industry, a glass warehouse, a factory of flowers’.34 Although the house and gardens were destroyed in 1910 to make way for industrial buildings, Martial Caillebotte’s photographs, which date from the winter of 1891–2, reveal its general form35 (Figure 7.5). Orderly and compact (one tenth of the size of Yerres, even after successive expansions), Caillebotte’s garden omitted the vast expanses of grass that dominated the aspect of Yerres, instead featuring narrow paths that threaded their way among neatly delineated flower beds and orthogonal sections (reminiscent of the stamp album), combining (like his yacht designs) rectilinear and curvilinear forms to produce a synthetic whole. Within and beyond its boundaries and buildings, Caillebotte worked as a gardener and horticulturalist, yacht designer and racer, painter and municipal councillor, often, as Martial’s photographs reveal, adopting the working uniform appropriate to the task at hand; at the same time he was fully immersed in the exclusively bourgeois milieu of the CVP, flanked at work by employees both in his garden, his yachting chantier, and on the Seine.36 In Petit Gennevilliers multiple kinds of work came together and interpenetrated, secured

Figure 7.5  Martial Caillebotte, The House, Studio, Garden, and Greenhouse of Gustave Caillebotte at Petit Gennevilliers, c. 1891–2, photograph. Private Collection.

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Figure 7.6  Gustave Caillebotte, Le Jardin potager, Petit Gennevilliers, c. 1881–2, oil on canvas. Private Collection. by forms and relations of sociability that were fixed, hierarchical and clear, and yet conducive to Caillebotte’s categorically unfixing labours. In Le Jardin potager, Petit Gennevilliers (Figure 7.6), painted only shortly after the Caillebotte brothers had first purchased the property, Caillebotte adopts a viewpoint that accentuates both the orthogonality of his plotted-out garden, and the contrasting undulation of the terrain onto which it had been imposed. The combination of linear order within a clearly delineated space whose underlying armature is defined by an off-centre vanishing point matches that of the jardin potager pictured in Les Jardiniers (Plate 7), which must surely have been on Caillebotte’s mind. Here too, the work of the pictured gardener (this time alone) is indexed by the chromatic transformation of a surface (from empty brown to streaks of green) analogous to the work of the painter himself. Caillebotte’s other paintings of his Petit Gennevilliers estate and its environs document (and in so doing actively produce) it as a space of labour. Boathouse at Argenteuil, for example, captures the Seine populated by the skiffs and racing yachts of the kind Caillebotte himself designed and raced.37 Tournesols au bord de la Seine (Figure 7.7), painted from the bottom of Caillebotte’s garden, juxtaposes his sunflowers – in the foreground – with a public laundry barge moored on the far bank of the Seine. The textured sunflowers, dense with signs of reworking, sit before the shimmering

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Figure 7.7  Gustave Caillebotte, Tournesols au bord de la Seine, c. 1885–6. 90.2 × 71.1 cm, oil on canvas. Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, inv. 2013.45.3. and equally rich surface of the water; the elongated reflection of the vibrant tricolour installed atop the barge draws the eye up through the composition and visually balances the dense vegetation of the foreground and right edge. It is noteworthy that Caillebotte was drawn, again, to the communal laundry barge near his garden and highly significant that the composition is structured by the balance of three elements that signify labour indexically: the laundry barge for the work of the local laundresses, the sunflowers for the work of Caillebotte and his gardeners, the materiality and chromatic shimmer of the water’s surface for Caillebotte-the-painter. This canvas is part of a small series of views of this particular laundry barge and the clean laundry it produced, one of whose number positions the viewer before the barge and its hungout laundry on the opposite bank, looking at Caillebotte’s house and gardens across the river.38 In Laundry Barges along the Seine; Laundry Drying the elision of these spaces and products of labour is made all the more obvious by the imperious tricolour, rampant against the breeze, drawing the eye directly from the drying laundry, to the barge, across the river and right to the heart of Caillebotte’s property, the buildings of which are isolated from the sky against an apex of trees.

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Figure 7.8  Gustave Caillebotte, Linge séchant au bord de la Seine, Petit Gennevilliers, 1892. 105.5 × 150.5 cm, oil on canvas. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne. Another painting from this series, Linge séchant au bord de la Seine, Petit Gennevilliers (Figure 7.8) positions the viewer on that same bank, but facing the opposite direction. A clothesline congested with laundry runs along the edge of a shaded path, raised at its midpoint to reveal a view of the Seine and the laundry barge moored on its bank. As with his sunflowers (Figure 7.7), Caillebotte has painted the laundry thickly, articulating its wind-swept movement by progressively disarranging the brushstrokes that comprise each sheet such that the intensity of their entropy and the density of their materiality signifies the energy of their motion. For Michael Fried, this painting speaks to Caillebotte’s desire assert his ‘fidelity to Impressionism’ while at the same time going beyond it, combining its ‘optical assumptions’ with an attention to ‘embodiedness and materiality’ that Fried takes to be characteristic of Caillebotte.39 It is the ‘uncontrollably mobile and noisily aural (also temporally protracted) motif of the thrashing laundry’, ‘blowing and flapping in a strong wind’, that marks the attempt to activate this embodied materiality; the unresolved (unfinished) state of the canvas, however, reveals, for Fried, the impossibility of Caillebotte’s ambition and the creative bankruptcy of his later years.40 Although the emphasis for him is more about nostalgia, Michael Marrinan similarly suggests that Linge séchant represents a ‘final and unfinished farewell to his ambitions of serious painting’.41 By painting laundry drying, Caillebotte recalls his childhood among the bedding of Cambry et Cie; by producing studies from different vantage points within the ultimate scene, Caillebotte reiterates the working method of his most ambitious compositions; by indulging in a ‘parade of thick brushstrokes that represents a clothesline of laundry’, Caillebotte obstinately asserts the salience of an Impressionist technique made obsolete by Neo-Impressionism.42 Anthea Callen likewise focuses on the painting’s materiality and technique as evidence of Caillebotte seeking to rework a central paradox of Impressionist praxis: the disjuncture between its theoretical attachment to ephemerality and the multiple sessions of painterly work and reworking by which such ephemerality was typically rendered visible.43 For Callen,

 Working as Caillebotte in Petit Gennevilliers 159 however, rather than the thwack of billowing fabric, the loaded brush with which Caillebotte rendered the drying laundry conjures its ephemerality as it simultaneously references the painterly labour behind the effect.44 Similarly the (clichéd) motif of laundry drying evokes the Impressionist obsession with effect and signifies indexically the labour of washerwomen.45 For Marrinan, the depopulated scene ‘does not resonate with the usual naturalist interest in the labor implied by clean laundry’, and, while Callen raises Caillebotte’s oblique reference to a form of women’s work that erases the traces of its own activity in order to posit Impressionism (generally) as a craft practice, her understanding of the salience of work in this context is more attuned to Pissarro and Cézanne’s use of that term as synonymous and coextensive with painterly labour, being meaningless beyond the sphere of Art.46 Like gardeners, painters and floor scrapers, the chromatic transformation of a flat surface is the index of a washerwoman’s toil. Earlier, in the 1870s, Caillebotte had attempted to draw parallels between the labour of representation (his labour) and the labour represented (the labour of planing the floor of his studio) through contrivances of perspective that melded the surfaces upon which rentier and raboteurs worked. In Tournesols au bord de la Seine (c. 1885–6, Figure 7.7) and Linge séchant au bord de la Seine (1892, Figure 7.8), which post-date the purchase of the Petit Gennevilliers property and straddle the beginning of Caillebotte’s permanent residence there, this task is entrusted to the pictures’ variegated textures and brushstrokes. As I argued in Chapter 6, the complex perspective of Les raboteurs de parquet (Plate 1) was part of Caillebotte’s displaced and tentative engagement with a specific form of working corporeality; his shift in emphasis towards the materiality of paint is, paradoxically enough, coextensive with an increasing obliqueness and indexicality by which he approaches the physical mechanics of work. Rather than representing raboteurs, jardiniers or blanchisseuses in the thick of their toil, bodies distorted and deformed by their labour, Caillebotte pictures only their products. Caillebotte’s paintings of yachting and rowing followed a similar trajectory, whereby the muscular, masculine phenomenology of paintings like Canotiers ramant sur l’Yerres (1877, Figure 1.7) gave way, after a brief flirtation with abstraction (Marine, régates à Villers, c. 1880, Figure 1.5), to the bounding, regulatory, orthogonal structure of Régates à Argenteuil (1893, Plate 3). Having relocated away from Paris – whose built environment, visual culture, and social structures were resonant with the subjective trauma of loss and the societal trauma of class conflict – to the more bourgeois-exclusive social universe of the CVP in Petit Gennevilliers, where relations with the working class were fixed and hierarchical, the encounter with class difference, labouring bodies, was of a crucially different, less problematic, register. In the creative crucible of Caillebotte’s Petit Gennevilliers sanctuary, the interpenetration of his labours took concrete form: where he drafted the designs of his racing yachts in his studio, surrounded by his easel and paintings (Figure 7.9), into which, at other moments, the flowers from his meticulously planned and plotted garden or neatly aligned greenhouse (the ‘factory of flowers’) would offer him motifs for paintings, and from which, of an evening, he might retire to his salon to enjoy a meal surrounded by these same flower paintings that spoke of a richly textured creative polyphony.47

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Figure 7.9  Martial Caillebotte, Gustave à sa table à dessin, c. 1891, photograph. Private Collection © Comité Caillebotte, Paris. Just as Caillebotte’s stamp album had facilitated a fantasy of microcosmic order – an endlessly repetitive ordering and taxonomizing of material fragments which functioned as the performative filter between subject and social reality, a structure for the production of sense and subjectivity in which the narrative of the collection is the narrative of the collector – so too did his Petit Gennevilliers garden. What distinguishes Le Jardin potager, Petit Gennevilliers (Figure 7.6) from Les Jardiniers (Plate 7), and speaks to the influence of philately on Caillebotte’s painterly vision, is the semiosis of iteration and serialization by which Caillebotte signifies the passage of time and the process of labour. Rows of trees, each in different states of maturity (from sapling to more mature) extend along the outmost edges of the two columns of rectangular plots, themselves pictured in various states of completeness. This double contrast, between saplings and more mature trees and between empty plots and those striated by leafy greens, emphasizes that the garden we perceive is a work-in-progress rooted in a specific moment in time, and, simultaneously, signifies the extended duration over which its progressive transformation takes (has taken, will take) place. The serially iterative juxtaposition of discrete variations on a singular theme (garden plot, tree) is a semiotic strategy drawn straight from the stamp album. There, a prototypical ideal was signified by means of the exhaustive juxtaposition of its minutely aberrational manifestations (Figure 2.2). Here, the ideal form of the completed garden is signified (but not pictured) by the arrangement of various ways in which its completeness is absent (trees yet to have grown, plots yet to have been filled, cabbages yet to grow out).48 The categorical segregation of plants into plots matches the strict organizational parameters of Caillebotte’s bespoke system of arranging stamps (that Tapling was later to adopt). Perhaps influenced by his subscription to the Revue horticole (which kept him up to date with horticultural fashions) or by his enduringly close relationship with Claude Monet (or both), Caillebotte laid out his garden according to Michel Eugène Chevreul’s theory of complementary colour.49 As with his philatelic practice, therefore,

 Working as Caillebotte in Petit Gennevilliers 161 the work of Caillebotte’s gardening consisted in arranging discrete chromatic units within a defined space according to a priori principles proper to the form of the collection’s artefacts, which produced the eminently philatelic effect of oscillation between precise detail and overall effect, both within the same image and between them. This categorical grouping, serial ordering and iterative juxtaposition of flowers redolent of the stamp album likewise continued in the greenhouse, where Caillebotte’s collection of rare orchids was neatly displayed, organized into rows.50 Monet’s chromatic gluttony found no counterpoint in Caillebotte’s horticultural control. As Stephan Gwynn put it, ‘Monet … cared nothing about [horticultural] purism and was gluttonous for colour’; Caillebotte’s later paintings reveal him to have retained a profound concern for categorical specificity, separating out sunflowers (Sunflowers in the Garden at Petit Gennevilliers, c. 1885) from roses (Roses in the Garden at Petit Gennevilliers, c. 1886) and chrysanthemums (Chrysanthèmes blancs et jaunes, jardin du Petit Gennevilliers, 1893).51 As we know, the narrative of the collection is the narrative of the collector. The collapsing of temporalities – the instant of perception onto the extended process of production (within and of the painting) – that Caillebotte’s philatelic vision here accomplishes was similarly central to my understanding of his self-portraits. In these paintings, the visible facture and highly worked matière combine to evoke simultaneously the thick texture of extended working and the patina of a life spent (among other things) painting (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). Caillebotte thus came to identify the value of the visible brushstroke in its capacity to encode the labour of the painter as a physical and material process with a durational temporality distinct from the ostensible instantaneity of the viewing experience. The garden too was characterized by an extended temporality, one of seasonal rhythms to which the gardener-painter must submit: ‘I am doing a Stanopea Aurea,’ Caillebotte wrote to Monet in 1890, cancelling an engagement, ‘which has been in flower since this morning and as the flower only lasts three or four days and will not bloom again for another year I cannot leave it. Present my apologies to Mirbeau.’52 Painted in a looser hand than his Yerres version, Le Jardin potager, Petit Gennevilliers inscribes the labour of the painter, not just in the analogy of chromatic transformation but also by grounding this painterly work in the same (complex, multiple) temporalities of labour condensed by the image itself. The labour of the hunched-over gardener is integral in bringing together these potentially disparate temporalities; without his efforts, caught absorbed in a moment of physical strain – work of a kind that pulls and distorts the body, akin to Caillebotte’s rough treatment of the floor scrapers (Plate 1) – progress would degenerate into stasis. One of Martial’s photographs (Figure 7.10) captures Caillebotte bent over, working his garden in precisely this manner, wearing what might be precisely the same uniform (save the jacket, which, in the painting, might have been removed to reveal the white undershirt concealed in the photograph). The ambiguity of this gardener’s identity – Caillebotte himself or one of his employees – underscores Caillebotte’s (phantasmic) belief in the capacity of labour to blur class distinctions and enable the labourer to renegotiate his socially bequeathed identity. Hybridizing multiple labours – the morphology and semiotic strategies of philately, the rhythmic and multiple

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Figure 7.10  Martial Caillebotte, Gustave Caillebotte gardening at Petit Gennevilliers, February 1892, photograph. Private Collection.

Figure 7.11 Gustave Caillebotte, Dahlias cactus rouges, 1892. 40 × 32 cm, oil on canvas. Private Collection © Comité Caillebotte, Paris. temporalities of horticulture and the material process of painting – into a form that was completely his, safe in the grounds of his property, Caillebotte is able to picture directly (as well as indexically) the physical performance of labour he was to elide in Linge séchant au bord de la Seine, Petit Gennevilliers (Figure 7.8).

 Working as Caillebotte in Petit Gennevilliers 163 The decorative project with which I began this chapter, the panels of marguerites (Figure 7.1), capucines (Figure 7.2) and orchidées (Figure 7.3) that Caillebotte painted for the walls of his Petit Gennevilliers dining room, should thus be understood, in this context, not as a retrenchment from his ambitious achievements but as a re-articulation, and, in a way, a culmination of them. In flower paintings such as Dahlias cactus rouges (Figure 7.11), Caillebotte articulates his horticultural subject by way of an ostentatious ordering of brushstrokes; these red cactus dahlias are given form by the specificity of the structural organization of the brushstrokes of which they are composed: a structure that is iteratively transformed in the progression from flower to flower. The sketchy background makes no pretence to verisimilitude, with patches of uncovered canvas visible, but rather offers an alternative, more disordered, constellation of brushstrokes as a dialectic counterpoint to the dahlias. Such models of organization were intrinsic to Caillebotte’s collecting practice. Although presented with a looseness of touch that contained within it the potential for abstraction, the individual daisies (Figure 7.1), nasturtiums (Figure 7.2) and orchids (Figure 7.3) are clearly and legibly delineated with a taxonomical specificity. The frankness with which Caillebotte calls attention to the materiality of the painted object – the thick texture of paint and canvas – and its status as an object that is worked upon – visible brushstrokes – in combination with their mundane decorative purpose, solidify the rupture between painting and Art that had made itself visible earlier in Caillebotte’s career. Where Monet painted his later Nymphéas specifically for the walls of the Orangerie, Caillebotte was content that his flowers take their place among the objects and in the spaces from which they were cultivated. As I have argued, Caillebotte’s interest in philately had led him to develop a highly complex and idiosyncratic painterly style wherein space itself was fragmented and iteratively recomposed, with the canvas surface functioning as a locus of ordering for the discrete moments of a viewing experience (or multiple such experiences). This process of hybridizing space had as its ultimate goal the production of a convincingly totalized vision of Caillebotte’s social reality; its success thus depended upon a complex play of, on the one hand, encoding the work of the artist as a collector of visual fragments in moments of perspectival contrivance and, on the other, disavowing the artificiality or materiality of the painted object itself. The macrocosmic order of Caillebotte’s garden and greenhouse, based on extrinsic chromatic or epistemological categorizations – Chevreul’s colour theory or biological taxonomy – had come to influence the microcosmic level of Caillebotte’s painterly labour. If, as according to Øystein Sjåstad’s Theory of the Tache, ‘the tache is painting’s reality. It is what Jacques Lacan calls the point de capiton … in its purest form’ – that is a material mark that at once acts as the nodal point around which meaning is constructed and is itself a signifier of the very abyss such meaning opens – then, Dahlias cactus rouges, and the cognates I have been examining, represent the zenith of Caillebotte’s complex hybridization of painting and collecting under the banner of work, the infiltration of the processes and forms of collecting into painting’s atomic level.53 The canvas becomes coextensive with, and symbolically isomorphic to, the garden itself (and resonant of the stamp album that had come before), taking form as a constellation of individual chromatic signifiers ordered by the hand of Caillebotte according to abstract principles

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of horticulture and the science of perception, the symbolic content of which was encoded in the relationally iterative and serialized juxtaposition of categorizable units. If viewed from the vantage point of art history, Caillebotte’s late paintings lack the interest of those well-known masterpieces whose increasing public visibility is now securing his belated, but much-deserved, acclaim. Yet, relocated to the creative context in which Caillebotte conceived, executed, viewed and enjoyed them, they distil much of what makes his overall painterly output so extraordinary. With his final works, decorative panels destined for the walls of his dining room, Caillebotte had come full circle, finally becoming that which had so fascinated him since 1877, yet from which something had always held him back: a house painter. In 1877, their shared use of the term ‘peinture d’impression’ gave Émile Bergerat cause to equate with scorn the Impressionists and simple, unthinking house painters; by the 1890s Caillebotte, having spent his life working at the task, had made the distinction moot.54

Conclusion

Monsieur Caillebotte[’s…] manoeuvring is bolder, his sail is a kind of defiance addressed to the wind; he is driven on by mockery with an audacity that, we hasten to add, success often justifies. The likeable Impressionist is not a risk-taker in painting only. To those who criticize his style, he could make the peremptory riposte: it wins.1 Le Yacht, 1879 A central ambition of this book has been to take seriously Gustave Caillebotte’s myriad activities as being worthy of analysis in their own right. The result has been the bringing to light of new information about the manifold aspects of Caillebotte’s creative life, charting his work as a philatelist, horticulturalist, yachtsman, naval engineer, politician and painter. I have attempted to leverage this information to propose completely new understandings of Caillebotte’s paintings, refusing to merely juxtapose them alongside chronologically proximate hobbies, but instead attending to their highly complex structural connections. I have attempted too to understand how each of these activities related to what Caillebotte was, how he saw himself and how he brought this identity into being. I have argued that ‘Gustave Caillebotte’ (an anxious, decentred, traumatized subject of an anxious, decentred, traumatized society) was an effect of the multiplicity of these various activities. Re-situating painting within this much broader structure, as one element among many, allowed me to propose original readings of specific paintings, identify new connections as existing between them and reconceptualize the trajectory of Caillebotte’s entire career. In Part 1, I offered close readings of Caillebotte’s self-portraits in order to better understand his fractured, alienated subjectivity. I argued that, at numerous points in his life, Caillebotte undertook to explore and resolve his frustrated relation to his own class identity, in both its subjective and intersubjective dimensions, a frustration made particularly acute by moments of contact with familial trauma and social antagonism, through painting. Specifically, it was through legibly encoding signifiers of the process and labour of painting itself that Caillebotte articulated his alienation and attempted to construct the terms of its resolution. Since, first, class was the frame through which Caillebotte experienced his subjective displacement and, second, Republican ideology relied upon and in turn propagated a conception of work’s determinate relation to class, Caillebotte came to identify work as containing the potential to reconfigure the class identity that he found so troublesome. However, as Autoportrait au chevalet (Figure 1.1) makes manifest, painting alone, even when saturated with the signifiers

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of the work of art, of painting and of sitting, was not capable of forging a coherent subjectivity, instead leaving Caillebotte fractured and fragmented. I excavated the fundamental significance for Caillebotte of collecting as a special and ambiguous kind of work, of the kind Susan Stewart characterizes as a false labour, with a structural relation to the labour of painting.2 Further, I argued that the motor for Caillebotte’s multiple collecting practices was the compulsion to repeat borne of the trauma of bereavement – Caillebotte lost his father in 1874, his younger brother in 1876 and his mother in 1878 – and its symbolic registration with the bureaucratic apparatuses of state. The performative act of affixing stamps to documents crystallized them as the token of his loss and the conduit for Caillebotte’s relation to his ideologically constituted social reality. As such, when his traumatic encounter with the real of mortality animated in Caillebotte the anxiety of absence and the desire for completeness, it stimulated a life-long and multifaceted attachment to different kinds of seriality, which first of all manifested as the compulsion to collect, collate, arrange and display the very signifiers by which that trauma had been made operative as a symbolic fact: stamps. The concept of false labour was crucial in opening the discursive ground for considering the gap separating material conditions from imaginary positionalities: it is precisely the gap between Caillebotte’s objective position within the Third Republics class structure and his imaginary class identity – between the concrete economic reality of his labours and his own fantasy-fuelled experience of them – that my account has situated itself. In this respect, Caillebotte’s false labour is far more real than a naive reading of them might ascertain. In Part 2, I investigated the year 1877 as a crucial moment in the development of Caillebotte’s response to the problematical inadequacy of painting that his self-portraits had dramatized. The complex and idiosyncratic manipulations of perspective in his street scenes of Paris – Rue de Paris; temps de pluie (Plate 2), Le Pont de L’Europe (Figure 3.1) and Les Peintres en bâtiment (Figure 3.2) – I argued, represented a direct response to the dialectics of fracture and totality that animated the Republican reaction to Communard class conflict; in each of these paintings, Caillebotte fractured, serialized and iteratively recomposed the fabric of space and the arrangements of people within it, producing a dizzying juxtaposition of looming foregrounds and plunging recession, spatial anomalies and impossible mathematical precision. This was not simply a question of how to translate the three dimensions of real space onto the flat support, but rather a formal re-enactment of the very processes by which the ominously atomized social organism that Caillebotte took for his subject had itself come to be. I argued that, in doing so, Caillebotte cross-pollinated the visual and symbolic forms of his contemporaneously constituted stamp album: its ordered orthogonality, serially iterative narrative form, prioritization of conceptual organization principles over naturalistic verism and oscillation between totality and detail. I reconstructed the Caillebotte collection by reference to the influence it had on the extant Tapling Collection and argued the case for it to be considered as an important and heretofore underplayed source for Caillebotte’s idiosyncratic painterly aesthetic. Caillebotte’s subject in his 1877 paintings, Haussmannized Paris, was attractive as a synecdoche for the entire socio-ideological edifice and as the material manifestation of the

 Conclusion 167 multiple processes of modernization, and the antagonistic resistance to modernization that characterized the early Third Republic. As T. J. Clark famously argues, the Haussmannized built environment was part of an ideological attempt to effect and enforce social harmony by making a spectacle of its shared spaces within the remit of which the state’s preferred configuration of the social as a harmonious but hierarchical constellation of classes was given form.3 I investigated the ideological and bureaucratic functions of the various components of the postal system – as well as its relations to philatelic practice, design, pedagogy, visual culture and politics – in order to situate the post as an integral part of those very social, economic, political and ideological transformations of which Haussmannized Paris was both symptom and index. As such, in his attempts to mitigate or contain the ideological volatility of his subject matter, Caillebotte adopted and creatively adapted the working method, visual morphology and symbolic forms of the stamp album, as if to borrow from the ideologically normative function of the wider postal machinery and the psychologically comforting experience of collecting. Caillebotte complemented the work of painting with the work of philately in such a way as to treat the canvas surface as a locus of ordering in which meaning is relational and serial. Proposing Caillebotte’s philatelic impressionism is thus not simply an exercise in naming a new style or genre in order to resolve his ambiguous liminality between the genre-tags of Impressionism, Naturalism and Realism; rather, it demands attention be paid to both the internal and external structures for the production of meanings and subjectivities that pertain distinctively to Caillebotte’s canvases. This experience of condensing multiple forms of work on the surface of the canvas and hybridizing their visual and symbolic forms would prove crucial for Caillebotte. Although, almost immediately after 1877, Caillebotte’s painting shifted away from visualizing himself right at the centre of Parisian sites of ambiguous class mixing and towards the domain of the bourgeois interior and of Yerres – spaces in which the relationship between the bourgeois and his employees was rather more clear cut – he never lost faith in the power of work to offer at once a soothing sense of fixity and order, while at the same time retaining the potential for a reconfiguration of that which seemed overbearing or stifling. In Part 3, I read Caillebotte’s paintings of classed and gendered bodies against and alongside Émile Zola’s critique of them: in the specific context of his proximate novel, L’Assommoir; and in the general context of the Naturalist discourse centred on the concepts of ‘temperament’ and ‘work’. For both Caillebotte and Zola, work was possessed of the power to make the body both desirable and disgusting, to fragment it into part-objects, to totalize it and to obscure it. I demonstrated that the depth of Caillebotte’s identification with his raboteurs (Plate 1) was driven by oscillation between fragmentation and totalization, between class difference and its resolution in work. Crucially, it was not simply the work of the floor scrapers that Caillebotte found so captivating and useful, but rather the refraction of their physical labours through the prism of self-conscious visual signification: a fusion of the surfaces upon which both raboteur and painter work, a homology of shared craft. As Zola identified, in 1875 Caillebotte had demurred, screening the phenomenological, corporeal aspect of

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hard, physical labour behind a sheen-like screen of diffused light. Contrastingly, the potentially disturbing unfixity of Caillebotte’s later nudes – no longer working and thus animated by a gaze whose desire is of a different register – attests to a disquieting realm beyond the suturing remit of work, one in which sexual desire was always at risk of collapsing into putrefaction and disgust. In Part 4, I argued that Caillebotte’s ‘acting out’ in 1887, his abrupt and permanent move from Paris to Petit Gennevilliers, was not a wholesale rejection of the terms of his project as it existed at that moment but rather a shift in register. The specific form taken by Caillebotte’s urge to collect in the 1870s and 1880s – philately – was a function of, on the one hand, Caillebotte’s desire to understand his place within his ideologically produced social reality and, on the other hand, the central role played by postage stamps and the postal service in the production of that very social reality. However, if Paris was stained by class antagonism, it also (to an extent) contained it. As the form and context of Caillebotte’s life shifted with his move away from Paris, so did the object of his collecting and his labour; yet, its fundamental functioning and psychological purpose remained. I understood Caillebotte’s Petit Gennevilliers estate as a carefully bounded and ordered creative crucible, in which the distinctions between employer and employee could be blurred, and in which creative labours were cross-pollinated with renewed vigour. In this respect, Caillebotte’s childhood experiences at Yerres – likewise a space wherein the performance of labour and leisure could be carefully triangulated – was understood to be foundational. The decorative panels depicting flowers in various states of quasi-modernist abstraction, one set of which Caillebotte left unfinished at his death, marked a crucial moment of success in Caillebotte’s enduring fantasy of working at art: a fantasy that led him to the false labour of collecting and the persistent and assiduous cross-pollination of his labours.

Notes Introduction 1 (Caillebotte eut vraiment la conviction en lui, et ce qu’il laisse dépasse l’occupation de l’amateur. Il aurait pu ne prendre ici qu’un prétexte à créer des intermèdes de sa vie, se donner le luxe facile et inutile d’une peinture superficielle. Il était maître de son temps, sûr du lendemain, et il avait la passion du jardinage et la passion des bateaux. Tout de même il s’astreignit au labeur de la peinture.) Gustave Geffroy, ‘Notre temps: Gustave Caillebotte’, La Justice, 13 June 1894, 1. Emphasis mine. 2 The Philatelic Record, 36 vols, vol. 12 (London: Theodor Buhl and Co., 1890), 203–4, quote from 204. 3 ‘The Late M. Georges Caillebotte’, The London Philatelist, March 1894, 61. 4 (un véritable monument); (un goût sûr et l’amour du travail) ‘Mort de M. Georges Caillebotte’, Le Collectionneur de timbres-poste, February 1894, 31. 5 Following decades of neglect, and owing primarily to the hard work of the early Caillebotte scholars Marie Berhaut and Kirk Varnedoe, as Karin Sagner puts it, ‘today, Caillebotte has found his place in art history’. Karin Sagner, ‘Gustave Caillebotte. An Impressionist and Photography’, in Gustave Caillebotte: An Impressionist and Photography, cat. Karin Sagner, Max Hollein and Ulrich Pohlmann (Munich: Hermer, 2012), 19. See also Serge Lemoine, ‘Partie de campagne’, in Caillebotte à Yerres, au temps de l’impressionnisme, cat. Serge Lemoine (Paris: Flammarion, 2014), 13–18. The process of recovering Caillebotte’s achievements from the murky depths of historical forgetfulness, into which they began to sink even before Caillebotte’s death in 1894 and languished for many decades, was initiated and sustained primarily by two scholars, Marie Berhaut and Kirk Varnedoe. After completing her doctoral thesis on Caillebotte in 1947, in 1951 Berhaut curated an exhibition on Caillebotte at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, going on to produce a small monographic study in 1968, the first catalogue raisonné on the artist in 1978, and a posthumously published authoritative revised edition in 1994. Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894), cat. Marie Berhaut (Paris: Wildenstein, 1951); Marie Berhaut, Caillebotte, l’impressionniste (Lausanne: International Art Book, 1968); Caillebotte, sa vie et son œuvre. Catalogue raisonné des peintures et pastels (Paris: La Bibliothèque des Arts, Fondation Wildenstein, 1978); Gustave Caillebotte: catalogue raisonné des peintures et pastels (Paris: Wildenstein Institute, La Bibliothèque des Arts, 1994). Varnedoe’s contribution to Caillebotte scholarship began with an exhibition, held in 1976–7 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Brooklyn Museum. Gustave Caillebotte: A Retrospective Exhibition, cat. J. Kirk T. Varnedoe and Thomas P. Lee (Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1976). The catalogue for this exhibition formed the ‘skeleton’ for a revised and extended monographic study of Caillebotte published in 1987. Kirk Varnedoe, Gustave Caillebotte (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). Outside of these

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Notes texts, Berhaut and Varnedoe have also contributed to exhibition catalogues, edited volumes, journals and magazines. ‘Les dessins de Gustave Caillebotte’, in Les dessins de Caillebotte, by Jean Chardeau (Paris: Editions Hermé, 1989); ‘Odd Man In. A Brief Historiography of Caillebotte’s Changing Roles in the History of Art’, in Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist, cat. Anne Distel, et al. (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1995); J. Kirk T. Varnedoe, ‘Caillebotte’s Pont de l’Europe A New Slant’, in Gustave Caillebotte and the Fashioning of Identity in Impressionist Paris, ed. Norma Broude (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Marie Berhaut, ‘Introduction’, in Gustave Caillebotte. A Retrospective Exhibition, cat. J. Kirk T. Varnedoe and Thomas P. Lee (Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1976); ‘Gustave Caillebotte et le réalisme impressionniste’, Œil, November 1977; ‘Le legs Caillebotte. Vérités et contre-vérités’, in Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de l’art français (Paris: Société de l’Histoire de l’art français, 1985 [1983]); Marie Berhaut and Pierre Vaisse, ‘Le legs Caillebotte; Annexe; Documents’, ibid. As the publishing record of Berhaut and Varnedoe indicates, it was in the 1970s that the scholarly reassessment of Caillebotte took form. The post-1968 intellectual climate provided the theoretical tools and impetus for a shift away from the received and exclusive formalist hegemony towards social art history, in which Caillebotte’s complex achievements could be approached. Starting with the Wildenstein & Co. exhibitions in Paris (1951), London (1966) and New York (1968), Caillebotte’s work gradually became more accessible to the public: Le Pont de l’Europe was acquired by the Petit Palais in Geneva in 1957; in 1964 the Art Institute of Chicago purchased Rue de Paris; temps de pluie; in 1976–7 a large retrospective was held in Houston and Brooklyn; and by the late 1970s, the Musée d’Orsay felt it appropriate to bring the Raboteurs de parquet out of storage. Caillebotte (1848-1894), Berhaut; Gustave Caillebotte 1848-1894: A Loan Exhibition in Aid of the Hertford British Hospital in Paris (London: Wildenstein, 1966); Gustave Caillebotte, 1848-1894: A Loan Exhibition of Paintings (New York: Wildenstein and Company, 1968); Caillebotte. A Retrospective, Varnedoe and Lee. Other key texts which have emerged out of this renewed interest in Caillebotte include Éric Darragon, Caillebotte, trans. MarieHélène Agüeros (Bergamo: Bonfini, 1994); Pierre Wittmer, Caillebotte and His Garden at Yerres (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991). Originally published as Caillebotte au jardin (Saint-Remy-en-l’Eau: Editions d’Art Monelle, 1990). Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist, cat. Anne Distel, et al. (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1995); Daniel Charles, Le mystère Caillebotte. L’œuvre architecturale de Gustave Caillebotte peintre impressionniste, jardinier, philatéliste et régatier (Grenoble: Editions Glénat, 1994); Tamar Garb, ‘Gustave Caillebotte’s Male Figures: Masculinity, Muscularity and Modernity’, in Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-deSiècle France, by Tamar Garb (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998); Michael Fried, ‘Caillebotte’s Impressionism’, Representations, no. 66 (1999): 1–51; ‘Caillebotte’s Impressionism’, in Gustave Caillebotte and the Fashioning of Identity in Impressionist Paris, ed. Norma Broude (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Norma Broude, ed., Gustave Caillebotte and the Fashioning of Identity in Impressionist Paris (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2002). The most recent scholarship on Caillebotte has emerged out of the recent glut of exhibitions, eight in the last decade, on the artist. Caillebotte peintre et jardinier, cat. Marina Ferretti Bocquillon, Paula Luengo and Gilles Chardeau (Vanves: Éditions Hazan, 2016); Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye, cat. Mary Morton and George

 Notes 171 T. M. Shackelford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Caillebotte à Yerres, au temps de l’impressionnisme, cat. Serge Lemoine (Paris: Flammarion, 2014); Gustave Caillebotte, Impressionist in Modern Paris, cat. Yasuhide Shimbata (Tokyo: Bridgestone Museum of Art, Ishibashi Foundation, 2013); Gustave Caillebotte: An Impressionist and Photography, cat. Karin Sagner, Max Hollein and Ulrich Pohlmann (Munich: Hermer, 2012); Dans l’intimité des frères Caillebotte, peintre et photographe, cat. Serge Lemoine, et al. (Paris: Skira Flammarion, 2011); Gustave Caillebotte, cat. Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark, Dorothee Hansen and Gry Hedin (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2008); Caillebotte. Au cœur de l’impressionnisme (Lausanne: La Bibliothèque des Arts, 2005). 6 Caillebotte jardinier, Bocquillon, Luengo and Chardeau; Caillebotte, Morton and Shackelford; Caillebotte à Yerres, Lemoine; Gustave Caillebotte, Fonsmark, Hansen and Hedin. 7 John Rewald, The History of Impressionism (London: Secker and Warburg, 1980), 346. This phrase seems to have originated with the critic Gaston Vassy, see L’Evénement [Gaston Vassy], ‘La Journée à Paris: L’Exposition des impressionnistes’, L’Evénement, 6 April 1877, 2. Reprinted in Ruth Berson, The New Painting: Impressionism 1874-1886. Documentation, Volume 1. Reviews, 2 vols., vol. 1 (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1996), 144–5. For Jean Leymarie, Caillebotte was a ‘peintre amateur’. Jean Leymarie, L’Impressionnisme, 2 vols (Geneva: Skira, 1955). Quoted in Lemoine, ‘Partie de campagne’, 13. 8 Rewald, Impressionism, 570. Jean-Léon Gérôme quoted and translated in James E. Cutting, ‘Gustave Caillebotte, French Impressionism, and mere exposure’, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 10, no. 2 (2003): 319. Cutting further cites The Impressionists and the Salon (1874–1886) (Riverside: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and University of California, Riverside, 1974), unpaginated; John Rewald, The History of Impressionism (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946), 422. On the Caillebotte Affair see Pierre Vaisse, ‘Le legs Caillebotte d’après les documents’, in Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de l’art français (Paris: Société de l’Histoire de l’art français, 1985 [1983]), 201–8; Berhaut, ‘Le legs Caillebotte. Vérités et contre-vérités’, 209–23; Berhaut and Vaisse, ‘Le legs Caillebotte; Annexe; Documents’, 223–39; Pierre Vaisse, Deux façons d’écrire l’histoire. Le legs Caillebotte (Paris: Institut national d’histoire de l’art et Editions Ophrys, 2014). 9 ([le] portrait de Caillebotte amateur, donne peut-être une clé pour comprendre sa peinture). Sophie Pietri, ‘Introduction’, in Gustave Caillebotte: catalogue raisonné des peintures et pastels, by Marie Berhaut (Paris: Wildenstein Institute, La Bibliothèque des Arts, 1994), viii. 10 Quote from Albert Boime, Art and the French Commune: Imagining Paris after War and Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 77–96. Julia Sagraves, ‘The Street’, in Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist, cat. Anne Distel, et al. (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1995), 88–101. 11 T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris and the Art of Manet and His Followers, Revised ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988). 12 Mary Morton and George T. M. Shackelford, ‘Introduction’, in Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye, cat. Mary Morton and George T. M. Shackelford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 15. C.f. ‘Caillebotte as a painter, a paint

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handler, isn’t in the same league as his greatest contemporaries.’ Fried, ‘Caillebotte’s Impressionism’, 67. 13 Žižek broached the subject of ideology in Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative. Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2008); For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London and New York: Verso, 2008); ‘The Spectre of Ideology’, in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 1994), 1–33. The issues raised in these pieces continue to be reworked by Žižek across his œuvre, as well as in secondary literature from the increasingly expanding field of Žižek studies. 14 ‘Spectre of Ideology’, 1; George I. García and Carlos Gmo. Aguilar Sánchez, ‘Psychoanalysis and politics: the theory of ideology in Slavoj Žižek’, International Journal of Žižek Studies 2, no. 3 (2008). http:​//ziz​ekstu​dies.​org/i​ndex.​php/I​JZS/a​rticl​ e/vie​w/125​/125;​ Sarah Kay, Žižek: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 134. 15 For a lengthier and more detailed analysis of Žižek’s theory of ideology as it relates to the discipline of art history see Samuel Raybone, ‘Notes Towards Practicing Žižekian Ideology Critique as an Art Historical Methodology’, International Journal of Žižek Studies 9, no. 2 (2015): 1–20. http:​//ziz​ekstu​dies.​org/i​ndex.​php/i​jzs/a​rticl​e/vie​w/483​ /566.​ 16 In thinking of ideology as something that organizes visibility, I draw from Jacques Rancière’s concept of the partage du sensible (the division or distribution of the sensible). The partage du sensible is a specific configuration of the parameters of sense-perception which governs the domain of visibility, and the relations within this domain between perception and meaning. The partage defines whose voices ‘count’ and whose do not, what can be seen and what is invisible, what means what and what it rendered senseless. This distribution of the sensible is integral to the governing and administering machinery of power that Rancière terms the police and that elsewhere I argue correlates closely to Žižek’s definition of ideology. Jacques Rancière, La mésentente: Politique et philosophie (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1995); Le partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique (Paris: La Fabrique Editions, 2000). Translated into English: Disagreement. Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis and London: University of Missesota Press, 1999); The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, 2004). See Raybone, ‘Notes Towards Practicing Žižekian Ideology Critique as an Art Historical Methodology’, 11–15. 17 Claire White, Work and Leisure in Late Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Visual Culture. Time, Politics and Class (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 1–2. 18 Maurice Agulhon, The French Republic, 1879-1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 27. 19 Ibid., 27, 39. 20 (presque tout le monde en France devint un travailleur: le riche, le pauvre, les hommes d’affaires importantes ou moins importants devinrent des travailleurs destinés à créer un type de société idéale qui saurait être bénéfique pour tous.) Gabriel P. Weisberg, ‘Réalité et illusion. La propagande dans les images du travail de la fin du XIXe siècle’, in Des plaines à l’usine: images du travail dans la peinture française de 1870 à 1914 (Paris: Somology éditions d’art, 2001), 31. Nevertheless, France’s uneven and delayed economic development ensured that there was no universal or homogenous

 Notes 173 experience of work, nor simple or unequivocal image of it. Louis Bergeron, ‘Une France entre deux mondes’, ibid., 15–23. 21 Lehning identifies the tension between mass participation and Republican institutions within a context of wider cultural flux as the defining characteristic of early Third Republic political culture. James R. Lehning, To Be a Citizen. The Political Culture of the Early French Third Republic (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001); Jann Pasler, Composing the Citizen. Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2009). See also Christophe Charle, Social History of France in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Miriam Kochan (Oxford: Berg, 1994), 140; Roger Célestin and Eliane Françoise DalMolin, France from 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 89. As Judith Surkis has persuasively argued, this general drive to craft useful and loyal citizens impacted, and was in turn impacted by, parallel discourses on sex, gender and sexuality. Judith Surkis, Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870-1920 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). Other scholars have similarly highlighted the distinctly masculine political culture of the period. Peter McPhee, A Social History of France, 1789-1914, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 253, 260. 22 Sudhir Hazareesingh, Intellectual Founders of the Republic: Five Studies in NineteenthCentury Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 281–97; Agulhon, The French Republic, 12–13. 23 Patricia A. Tilburg, Colette’s Republic: Work, Gender, and Popular Culture in France, 1870-1914 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009), 31–3. 24 On the intertwinement of state and class formation(s) see Gerald Friedman, ‘The State and the Making of the Working Class: France and the United States, 18801914’, Theory and Society 17, no. 3 (1988): 403–30. 25 White, Work and Leisure, 3–17. 26 The English translation was consulted: Jacques Rancière, Proletarian Nights: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, trans. John Drury (London: Verso, 2012). 27 Roger Thomas, ‘General Introduction’, in Voices of the People: The Politics and Life of ‘La Sociale’ at the End of the Second Empire, ed. Adrian Rifkin and Roger Thomas (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 19. 28 Gérard Noiriel, Workers in French Society in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1990), xii–xiii. 29 Roger Magraw, A History of the French Working Class, 2 vols., vol. 1 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), ix. 30 Garb, ‘Caillebotte’s Male Figures’, 41–2. 31 See, for example, ibid., 39–40; Sagner, ‘Caillebotte and Photography’, 26–9; Gloria Groom, ‘Interiors and Portraits’, in Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist, cat. Anne Distel, et al. (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1995), 180; Morton and Shackelford, ‘Introduction’, 21; Michael Marrinan, ‘Caillebotte as Professional Painter: From Studio to the Public Eye’, in Gustave Caillebotte and the Fashioning of Identity in Impressionist Paris, ed. Norma Broude (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 24; ‘Caillebotte’s Deep Focus’, in Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye, cat. Mary Morton and George T. M. Shackelford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 27; Gustave Caillebotte: The Unknown

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Impressionist, cat. Anne Distel, et al. (London: The Royal Academy of Arts, 1996), 37; Caillebotte (1848-1894), Berhaut, unpaginated. 32 Varnedoe, Caillebotte, 2; Boime, Commune, 77; Dominique Lobstein, ‘Yerres et Caillebotte’, in Caillebotte à Yerres, au temps de l’impressionnisme, cat. Serge Lemoine (Paris: Flammarion, 2014), 25. This was Caillebotte’s second stint in the military, having served in an infantry unit near Cherbourg or Rouen between 1868 and 1869; he purchased a replacement between June 1869 and June 1870 to enable him to study for his licence en droit. Varnedoe, Caillebotte, 206, note 207; Darragon, Caillebotte, 144. 33 Anne Distel, ‘The Birth of an Impressionist’, in Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist, cat. Anne Distel, et al. (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1995), 30; Varnedoe, Caillebotte, 2. 34 In the post-Commune context, Caillebotte’s departure from the École des BeauxArts in favour of exhibiting with the Impressionists constituted ‘a radical repudiation of the values of his class’. Varnedoe, ‘Caillebotte’s Pont de l’Europe’, 15. ‘Socialement, Caillebotte est un peintre du plain-pied … Un bourgeois, mais de guingois’. Danielle Chaperon, ‘Caillebotte, peintre du plain-pied. Points de vue naturalistes’, in Caillebotte. Au cœur de l’impressionnisme (Lausanne: La Bibliothèque des Arts, 2005), 63. ‘Caillebotte’s images suggest that he was uncomfortable with his class and social identity.’ Groom, ‘Interiors and Portraits’, 180. 35 Caillebotte (1848-1894), Berhaut, unpaginated; Berhaut, ‘Introduction’, 15; Caillebotte: catalogue raisonné, 39–42; Darragon, Caillebotte, 134; Marrinan, ‘Caillebotte as Professional Painter’, 22; Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark, ‘Gustave Caillebotte; In the Midst of Impressionism: An Introduction’, in Gustave Caillebotte, cat. Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark, Dorothee Hansen and Gry Hedin (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008), 12; Sagner, ‘Caillebotte and Photography’, 26; Kristin Schrader, ‘In Praise of Idleness’, ibid., 213. Recognized, too, at the time. Ph.B., ‘Exposition des impressionistes’, La République française, 25 April 1877. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 123–5. 36 ‘[Caillebotte painted his surroundings i]n line with the aesthetics of naturalist literature and realist art, Caillebotte’s paintings were the result of intent observation and literal recording … His emphasis on visual description was motivated by the sense that meaning can be found in “reading” objects.’ Morton and Shackelford, ‘Introduction’, 15. 37 Groom, ‘Interiors and Portraits’, 180. ‘Dans ces intérieurs [1877–85], l’oisiveté est active, et l’activité concentration. La densité du réel se produit au détriment du naturel’. Alain Tapié, ‘Le réalisme de Gustave Caillebotte’, in Caillebotte. Au cœur de l’impressionnisme (Lausanne: La Bibliothèque des Arts, 2005), 16. 38 Caroline Mathieu, ‘Gustave Caillebotte et le nouveau Paris’, ibid., 28; Marrinan, ‘Caillebotte as Professional Painter’, 22–5. 39 On the umbrella as a ubiquitous symbol of the bourgeoisie see Daniel J. Sherman, ‘The Bourgeoisie, Cultural Appropriation, and the Art Museum in Nineteenth-Century France’, in The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, ed. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 141–2. Originally published as ‘The Bourgeoisie, Cultural Appropriation, and the Art Museum in Nineteenth-Century France’, Radical History Review 1987, no. 38 (1987): 38–58. 40 Juliet Mitchell, Siblings: Sex and Violence (Cambridge: Polity, 2003). 41 (M. Caillebotte a des Raboteurs de parquet et Un jeune homme à sa fenêtre, d’un relief étonnant. Seulement, c’est là de la peinture bien anti-artistique, une peinture propre, une glace, bourgeoise à force d’exactitude. Le décalque de la vérité, sans l’impression

 Notes 175 originale du peintre, est une pauvre chose.) Le Sémaphore de Marseille (Émile Zola), ‘Lettres de Paris: Autre correspondance’, Le Sémaphore de Marseille, [dated 29 April 1876] 30 April–1 May 1876, 1. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 108–9.

Chapter 1 1 (Le chapeau en arrière, les mains dans les poches, M. Caillebotte allait et venait, donnant des ordres, surveillant l’accrochage des toiles, et travaillant comme un commissionnaire, exactement comme s’il n’avait pas cent cinquante mille francs de rente.) Fichtre [pseud. Gaston Vassy], ‘L’Actualité: L’Exposition des peintres indépendants’, Le Réveil, 2 March 1882, 1. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 387. Emphasis mine. 2 Garb, ‘Caillebotte’s Male Figures’, 41–2; Morton and Shackelford, ‘Introduction’, 21. Caillebotte’s class alienation is routinely cited. Denys Sutton, ‘Gustave Caillebotte’, in Gustave Caillebotte 1848-1894. A Loan Exhibition in Aid of the Hertford British Hospital in Paris (London: Wildenstein, 1966), 20; Varnedoe, Caillebotte, 1; ‘Les dessins de Gustave Caillebotte’, 7; Darragon, Caillebotte, 32, 127–34; Richard Brettell, ‘Gustave Caillebotte and “The New Painting”. A Centennial Review’, Apollo, December 1995, 56; Varnedoe, ‘Odd Man In’, 13–16; Norma Broude, ‘Introduction’, in Gustave Caillebotte and the Fashioning of Identity in Impressionist Paris, ed. Norma Broude (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 1; Varnedoe, ‘Caillebotte’s Pont de l’Europe’, 15–17; Norma Broude, ‘Outing Impressionism. Homosexuality and Homosocial Bonding in the Work of Caillebotte and Bazille’, ibid., 130; Mathieu, ‘Caillebotte et Paris’, 29–30; Morton and Shackelford, ‘Introduction’, 20–1. In contrast to these notions of alienation and fracture, which are inseparable from Paris as an icon of modernity, Yerres is sometimes produced as a kind of paradise of subjective fulfilment and closure. Wittmer, Garden; Lobstein, ‘Yerres et Caillebotte’, 37. 3 Garb, ‘Caillebotte’s Male Figures’, 28. 4 This unsettling combination of the impassive or inscrutable face in a setting that ought to connote domestic familiarity recalls Caillebotte’s earlier Portrait de l’artist lui-même from around 1875–8. 5 This fusing of surfaces is likewise a crucial moment in Les raboteurs de parquet (Plate 1), on which more follows. 6 Quotations from Michael Marrinan, Gustave Caillebotte: Painting the Paris of Naturalism, 1872-1887 (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2016), 62; Marnin Young, Realism in the Age of Impressionism: Painting and the Politics of Time (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015), 77. See also Sagraves, ‘The Street’, 95–8; Boime, Commune, 77–96; Marrinan, ‘Caillebotte as Professional Painter’, 24–6; Young, Realism, 58–89. 7 Quotation from Montjoyeux [pseud. Jules Poignard], ‘Chroniques Parisiennes: Les indépendants’, Le Gaulois, 18 April 1879, 1. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 232–4. Caillebotte owned buildings at numbers 1, 3 and 8 rue des Deux-Gares, which each generated an income of 10,000 francs a year from rents; his government bonds generated 1,000 francs annually; his stocks in Les Douanes Ottomanes and La Detter Unifiée d’Egypte paid 3,000 and 5,500 francs per year in dividends

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respectively; and his capital exceeded 1 million francs by 1880, boosted by the sales of the family house on the rue de Miromesnil, the Yerres summer estate, and a farm in Chamfleury acquired by Martial père in 1852. These figures are available thanks to Michael Marrinan’s valuable archival work in the Archives Nationales Minutier Central. Marrinan, Caillebotte, 21–2. 8 Caillebotte, 19. 9 Eugen Weber, ‘Inheritance, Dilletantism, and the Politics of Maurice Barrès’, in My France: Politics, Culture, Myth, by Eugen Weber (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991), 227–8, 379 notes 210–11. Cited in Young, Realism, 227, note 243. 10 Marrinan, Caillebotte, 20–1. 11 Ibid., 21. 12 Jean-Marie Mayeur notes the ‘tremendous gap between the fortunes of the ruling classes and those of the other social classes. And it does not look as if this gap grew any smaller during this period.’ Mayeur cites data in F. Codaccioni, Lille, 1850-1914. Contribution à une étude des structures sociales (Lille: Université de Lille, 1971) which states that in Lille between 1873 and 1891, 92 per cent of the wealth was possessed by 10 per cent of the population. ‘In the pyramid of fortunes the base was extremely wide while the summit looked more like a slender needle.’ Jean-Marie Mayeur and Madeleine Rebérioux, The Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War, 1871-1914, trans. J. R. Foster (Paris: Cambridge University Press and Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1987), 66. C.f. ‘What we see in the period 1870-1914 is at best a stabilization of inequality at an extremely high level, and in certain respects an endless inegalitarian spiral, marked in particular by an increasing concentration of wealth.’ Thomas Piketty, Capital in the TwentyFirst Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 8, 379–81, 502. As Piketty notes, conservative economists and commentators would, without a hint of irony, defend the absence of progressive taxation on estates in France by claiming that, as France was already a democratic society (unlike the aristocratic English), it was not required. Ibid., 502–5. C.f. the following passage from the Larousse dictionary definition of héritier: ‘The law which regulates the transmission of inheritances is closely dependent on the social state of the people. In aristocratically constituted societies [i.e. England] this law is essentially conservative and tends to immobilize assets within families. In democratic states [i.e. France], on the contrary, the law of successions tends by division towards dissemination and the active circulation of private fortunes.’ (La loi qui règle la transmission des héritages est liée par une étroite dépendance à l’état social des peuples. Dans les sociétés aristocratiquement constituées, cette loi est essentiellement conservatrice et tend à immobiliser les patrimoines dans les familles. Dans les Etats démocratiques, au contraire, la loi des successions tend au fractionnement, à la dissémination et à l’active circulation des fortunes privées.) Pierre Larousse, ‘Héritier, iére’, in Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, 17 vols., vol. 9 (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1873), 223. Piketty’s analysis clearly reveals this characterization to be erroneous, see especially Piketty, Capital, 344. 13 Piketty defines a ‘society of rentiers’ as one in which ‘inherited wealth is very important and where the concentration of wealth attains extreme levels (with the upper decile owning typically 90 percent of all wealth, with 50 percent belonging

 Notes 177 to the upper centile alone)’. Capital, 264. C.f. above Mayeur and Rebérioux, Third Republic, 66. 14 Piketty, Capital, 340. 15 Ibid., 410. 16 Ibid., 25–7, 350–3. 17 Mayeur and Rebérioux, Third Republic, 68, 71; Young, Realism, 69. Fichtre [pseud. Gaston Vassy], ‘L’Exposition des peintres indépendants’, 1. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 387. Bertall [Charles Albert d’Arnoux], ‘Exposition des indépendants: Ex-Impressionnistes demain intentionistes’, L’Artiste, 1 June 1879. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 212–13. 18 (Bourgeois qui vit de son revenue, sans négoce, ni industrie.) Dictionnaire de la langue française, s.v. ‘Rentier, iére’, by Émile Littré, 4 vols., vol. 4 (Paris: Librairie de L. Hachette et Cie, 1874), 1623. (Le rentier étant l’homme qui vit de ses rentes, on devrait donner indifféremment ce nom à quiconque possède un capital, biens-fonds ou argent, qui le fait vivre sans qu’il ait besion de travailler.) Pierre Larousse, ‘Rentier, iére’, in Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, 17 vols., vol. 13 (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1875), 972. 19 Weber, ‘Inheritance’, 228. 20 (Les gouvernements, qui ont quelquefois de l’esprit, se sont aperçus que le rentier était tout le contraire d’une révolutionnaire; qu’autant ce dernier aime le changement, le bouleversement, autant le rentier redoute les moindres variations politiques, au point de voir un cataclysme dans un simple changement de cabinet. Ils se sont donc dit: faisons le plus de rentiers possible ; gouvernons, s’il se peut, un peuple de rentiers.) Larousse, ‘Rentier, iére’, 972. 21 Young, Realism, 69. 22 Marrinan, Caillebotte, 78–81, 127, 296. 23 (Caillebotte eut vraiment la conviction en lui, et ce qu’il laisse dépasse l’occupation de l’amateur. Il aurait pu ne prendre ici qu’un prétexte à créer des intermèdes de sa vie, se donner le luxe facile et inutile d’une peinture superficielle. Il était maître de son temps, sûr du lendemain, et il avait la passion du jardinage et la passion des bateaux. Tout de même il s’astreignit au labeur de la peinture.) Geffroy, ‘Gustave Caillebotte’, 1. 24 (M. Caillebotte est un travailleur, un chercheur hardi, sur lequel, je crois, on peut fonder des solides espérances.) G. Rivière, ‘Les Intransigeants et les impressionnistes: Souvenirs du salon libre de 1877’, L’Artiste, 1 November 1877, 298–302. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 185–7. 25 (l’activité véritablement extraordinaire … Le chapeau en arrière, les mains dans les poches, M. Caillebotte allait et venait, donnant des ordres, surveillant l’accrochage des toiles, et travaillant comme un commissionnaire, exactement comme s’il n’avait pas cent cinquante mille francs de rente.) Fichtre [pseud. Gaston Vassy], ‘L’Exposition des peintres indépendants’, 1. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 387. 26 Mary Morton et al., ‘Viewing Others: Portraits’, in Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye, cat. Mary Morton and George T. M. Shackelford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 165. Richard Brettell echoes this sentiment. Brettell, ‘Caillebotte and “The New Painting”’, 56. 27 Groom, ‘Interiors and Portraits’, 180. 28 (Avec un dos, nous voulons que se révèle un tempérament, un âge, un état social; par une paire de mains, nous devons exprimer un magistrat ou un commerçant; par un geste, toute une suite de sentiments. … Des mains qu’on tient dans les poches pourront

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être éloquentes. … une atmosphère se crée ainsi dans chaque intérieur, de même qu’un air de famille entre tous les meubles et les objets qui le remplissent.) Louis-ÉmileEdmond Duranty, La nouvelle peinture: à propos du groupe d’artistes qui expose dans les galeries Durand-Ruel (Paris: E. Dentu, 1876), 24–6. 29 Claude Ghez, ‘Reading Gustave Caillebotte’s Pont de l’Europe (1876)’, in Gustave Caillebotte: An Impressionist and Photography, cat. Karin Sagner, Max Hollein and Ulrich Pohlmann (Munich: Hermer, 2012), 95; Broude, ‘Outing Impressionism’, 121; Boime, Commune, 84. This connection was made at the time, see L’Evénement [Gaston Vassy], ‘L’Exposition des impressionnistes’, 2. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 387. Anthea Callen, The Work of Art: Plein-Air Painting and Artistic Identity in Nineteenth-Century France (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), 154. 30 In order of quotation Marius Chaumelin, ‘Actualités: L’Exposition des intransigeants’, La Gazette des étrangers, 8 April 1876, 1–2. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 67–8. Louis Enault, ‘Mouvement artistique: L’Exposition des intransigeants dans la galerie de Durand-Ruel’, Le Constitutionnel, 10 April 1876, 2. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 81–3. 31 Quotations in order Callen, The Work of Art, 154; Émile Bergerat, ‘Revue artistique: Les Impressionnistes et leur exposition’, Journal officiel de la république française, 17 April 1877, 2917–18. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 127–9. See also Anthea Callen, The Art of Impressionism: Painting Technique & the Making of Modernity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 110; The Work of Art, 193; Gustave Caillebotte, Fonsmark, Hansen and Hedin, 51. 32 Varnedoe, ‘Odd Man In’, 13–16; George T. M. Shackelford, ‘Man in the Middle’, in Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye, cat. Mary Morton and George T. M. Shackelford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 39–55. 33 Linda Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 23–4. 34 Ibid., 24–6. 35 Ibid., 53–6, 25, 37, 45. 36 Hazareesingh, Intellectual Founders, 281–97; Agulhon, The French Republic, 12–13. 37 Rewald, Impressionism, 346. 38 Weber, ‘Inheritance’, 229. Weber sees the cultural value of fin-de-siècle decadence – of Huysmans, Mallarmé, Moreau – in its capacity to speak to a listless, bored, privileged héritier elite. Hardly the aesthetic company in which it makes sense to contextualize Caillebotte, and not only for chronological reasons. Ibid., 230. 39 Fichtre [pseud. Gaston Vassy], ‘L’Exposition des peintres indépendants’, 1. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 387. Emphasis mine. 40 Geffroy, ‘Gustave Caillebotte’, 1; Larousse, ‘Rentier, iére’, 972. 41 Marrinan, Caillebotte, 33. 42 Ibid., 22, 59, 207. Marrinan sees Caillebotte’s choice of Bonnat as an act of deference to his father, and ultimately one that paid off, as Martial père’s will made arrangements for the expense ‘of about 30,000 francs’ to construct an atelier for his son. Ibid., 59. 43 Speaking about one facet of this divergence, Piketty writes that ‘looking at these data with the historical distance we enjoy today, we cannot help being struck by the impressive concentration of wealth in France during the Belle Époque, notwithstanding the reassuring rhetoric of the Third Republic’s economic and political elites.’ Piketty, Capital, 339. Moreover, given the similarity in the structures

 Notes 179 of capital inequality in Britain and France in the late nineteenth century, ‘even though Third Republican elites … liked to portray France as an egalitarian country compared with its monarchical neighbour across the Channel … the formal nature of the political regime clearly had very little influence on the distribution of wealth in the two countries’. Ibid., 344. 44 Callen, The Work of Art, 120–1, 132–8. 45 Ibid., 119–54. 46 Pioneering Modern Painting. Cezanne and Pissarro 1865-1885, cat. Joachim Pissarro (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2005), 27–42, quotation from 31. 47 Cézanne quoted in ibid., 31. 48 Pissarro and Cézanne quoted in ibid. 49 Ibid., 32. 50 Ibid., 26. 51 Ibid., 27. 52 On Zola referring to Cézanne and Pissarro as workers see James H. Rubin, Impressionism and the Modern Landscape: Productivity, Technology, and Urbanization from Manet to Van Gogh (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2008), 179. (Une œuvre d’art est un coin de la création vu à travers un tempérament) Émile Zola, Mes haines; causeries littéraires et artistiques. Mon salon. Édouard Manet, étude biographique et critique (Paris G. Charpentier, 1893), 229. What Cézanne and Pissarro signified by ‘sensation’, Zola signified by ‘temperament’. 53 For a contextualized account of the first Impressionist exhibition see Paul Tucker, ‘The First Impressionist Exhibition in Context’, in The New Painting: Impressionism 1874-1886, cat. Charles S. Moffett (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986), 93–117. 54 Paul Alexis, ‘Paris qui Travaille III: Aux peintres et sculpteurs’, L’avenir national, 5 May 1873. Quoted and translated in Marrinan, Caillebotte, 32. 55 Paul Alexis, ‘Une lettre de M. Claude Monet’, L’avenir national, 12 May 1873. 56 Tucker, ‘First Impressionist Exhibition’, 93–117. 57 Louis Leroy, ‘L’Exposition des impressionnistes’, Le Charivari, 25 April 1874, 79–80; [Jules-Antoine] Castagnary, ‘Exposition du boulevard des Capucines: Les Impressionnistes’, Le Siècle, 29 April 1874, 3; Ernest Chesneau, ‘Au Salon: Avertissement préalable’, Paris-Journal, 9 May 1874, 3. Reprinted respectively in Berson, Reviews, 1, 25–6, 15–17, 19–20. Jules Claretie, ‘Salon de 1874’, in L’art et les artistes français contemporains: avec un avant-propos sur le Salon de 1876 et un index alphabétique … by Jules Claretie (Paris: Charpentier, 1876), 260. 58 Callen, The Work of Art, 193–4; Stephen F. Eisenman, ‘The Intransigent Artist or How the Impressionists Got Their Name’, in The New Painting: Impressionism 18741886, cat. Charles S. Moffett (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986), 52. 59 ‘Intransigent Artist’, 52. 60 Louis Enault, ‘Mouvement artistique’, 2; Chaumelin, ‘Actualités: L’Exposition des intransigeants’, 1–2. Reprinted respectively in Berson, Reviews, 1, 81–3, 67–8. 61 Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘The Impressionists and Edouard Manet’, in The New Painting: Impressionism 1874-1886, cat. Charles S. Moffett (Oxford: Phaidon, [1876] 1986), 27–35. 62 (Ces soi-disant artistes s’intitulent les intransigeants, les impressionnistes … ils se barricadent dans leur insuffisance) Albert Wolff, ‘Le Calendrier parisien’, Le Figaro, 3 April 1876, 1. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 110–11.

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63 (l’exposition des peintres dites intransigeants ou impressionnistes). Varnedoe, Caillebotte, 197. 64 Eisenman, ‘Intransigent Artist’, 50. It is well known that Degas repeatedly argued passionately against exhibiting under the banner of Impressionism, which he never felt adequately described his Realist practice. 65 Linda Nochlin, ‘Morisot’s Wet Nurse. The Construction of Work and Leisure in Impressionist Painting’, in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Icon Editions, 1992), 241. 66 Callen, The Work of Art, 225. 67 Carol E. Harrison, The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France: Gender, Sociability, and the Uses of Emulation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 8. 68 Daniel Charles, ‘Caillebotte and Boating’, in Gustave Caillebotte, cat. Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark, Dorothee Hansen and Gry Hedin (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008), 110. Quote from Denis Jallet and Stella Goldenberg, ‘International Yachting in the Late Nineteenth Century: French, British, and American Inter-Relationships and Organisation’, Sport in History 31, no. 3 (2011): 314. Less than four years later, Gustave would become its vice-president. Charles, Caillebotte, 19–24. 69 Charles, Caillebotte, 24. 70 Between 1888 and 1889, nobody in France won more races than Gustave Caillebotte. ‘Caillebotte and Boating’, 116. 71 Charles, Caillebotte, 23, 47–8. Caillebotte played a central role in the creation of the L’Union des yachts français (UYF) in 1892, a representative national authority. ‘Caillebotte and Boating’, 117. See also ibid., 110–17; Charles, Caillebotte, 121. One notable example of Caillebotte’s willingness to experiment in the face of hostility, almost to the point of absurdity, is Mouquette, a yacht Caillebotte commissioned in 1886 to inaugurate the newly constructed Chantier Luce and to demonstrate the virtues of the English-style clippers. At the CVP congress in 1885, Caillebotte was forced to go along with a volume-based handicapping system, instead of his preferred option of one based on sail length. In response to this defeat, Caillebotte commissioned this highly unusual and radically designed yacht, eight times longer than wide and heavily ballasted: a manifesto of both Caillebotte’s radical willingness to defy convention in the sake of (what he saw as) progress, and his lack of patience with institutional political dynamics. Ibid., 48–50. 72 Charles, Caillebotte, 76. 73 Jean Chardeau, Les dessins de Caillebotte (Paris: Editions Hermé, 1989); Varnedoe, ‘Les dessins de Gustave Caillebotte’; Christopher Lloyd, ‘Les dessins de Gustave Caillebotte’, in Caillebotte. Au cœur de l’impressionnisme (Lausanne: La Bibliothèque des Arts, 2005), 41–5. 74 Many of Caillebotte’s yacht designs are reproduced in Charles, Caillebotte. 75 Ibid., 128. 76 Walter Benjamin, ‘Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting’, in Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Fontana, 1973), 61. 77 Fonsmark, ‘Midst’, 19. 78 Patrick Shaw Cable, ‘Questions of Work, Class, Gender, and Style in the art and life of Gustave Caillebotte’ (Doctoral Thesis, Case Western Reserve University, 2000), 124–5. 79 Jallet and Goldenberg, ‘Yachting in the Late Nineteenth Century’, 310–14; Eugen Weber, ‘Gymnastics and Sports in Fin-de-Siècle France: Opium of the Classes?’, The

 Notes 181 American Historical Review 76, no. 1 (1971): 70–98; ‘Pierre de Coubertin and the Introduction of Organized Sport in France’, Journal of Contemporary History 5, no. 2 (1970): 3–26. 80 See also Fonsmark, ‘Midst’, 14. 81 Broude, ‘Outing Impressionism’, 145.

Chapter 2 1 (lui et son frère, M. Martial Caillebotte, demeurant ensemble, consacrant quinze ans durant toutes leurs matinées à leurs albums. Reunissant tout: une grande fortune, un goût sûr et l’amour du travail, ils firent de leur collection un véritable monument.) ‘Mort de M. Georges Caillebotte’, 31. Emphasis mine. 2 Although the practice and history of collecting has received extended scholarly attention within the wider discipline of art history, the significance of Caillebotte’s collecting practices has been curiously underplayed, and significantly undertheorized, in the scholarship on the artist. Ironically, it was the abundance of Caillebotte’s creative pursuits (collecting among them) that effected his absence in the canonical histories of Impressionism from the middle of the twentieth century, whose authors sought men who had given themselves over completely to painting. John Rewald mischaracterized Caillebotte as an ‘engineer [… who] also painted in his spare time’ – a ‘timid’ Sunday painter. Rewald, Impressionism, 346, 388. One exclusion begat another; there was no place for Caillebotte’s paintings in the formalist metanarrative constituted in Rewald’s wake. Clement Greenberg’s rehabilitation of Monet’s late work, which for him ‘offered the mere texture of colour as adequate form in painting’, set a standard of Impressionism which Caillebotte – with his preference for a sombre and figurative realism, as opposed to abstraction and flatness – could not but fail to meet. Clement Greenberg, ‘Art’, The Nation, 5 May 1945, 526. In seeking to remedy this neglect, the earliest Caillebotte scholars – Marie Berhaut and Kirk Varnedoe – thus had no incentive to devote attention to Caillebotte’s extra-painterly pursuits, lest they undermine their production of him as a serious painter worthy of serious study. This rhetorical pressure was compounded by the theoretical parameters that had motivated and facilitated Varnedoe’s and (to a lesser extent) Berhaut’s mission in the first place: the social history of art, which was at the moment of Caillebotte’s rediscovery in the 1970s and 1980s fully germinating within academe. On the one hand, the critical and conceptual tools offered by the social history of art – being inflected by Marxism inherently attuned to contradictions, ruptures and antagonisms – was well equipped to make sense of Caillebotte’s paintings. However, on the other hand, its privileging of ‘art’ as a distinct historical and historiographical category – the axiom of ‘immanent aesthetic value’, as Keith Moxey has diagnosed it – compounded the problematic asymmetry of overvaluing his art and undervaluing everything else. Keith P. F. Moxey, ‘Semiotics and the Social History of Art’, New Literary History 22 (1991): 985. Although the social history of art offered the critical tools to comprehend Caillebotte’s paintings in relation to historicized structures of labour, leisure and class, its delimitation of art from wider culture has engendered an enduring hermeneutic privileging of painting that finds no correlate in Caillebotte’s actual practice. On which see

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Samuel Raybone, ‘“A millionaire who paints in his spare time”. The social history of art and the multiple rediscoveries of Gustave Caillebotte’, H-France Salon 9, no. 14 (2017): 12–15. It is only more recently that exhibitions have been staged which juxtapose Caillebotte’s paintings with evidence of his yachting, gardening and his brother’s photography. Gustave Caillebotte, Fonsmark, Hansen and Hedin; Caillebotte jardinier, Bocquillon, Luengo and Chardeau; Dans l’intimité des frères, Lemoine, et al.; Gustave Caillebotte and Photography, Sagner, Hollein and Pohlmann. Yet, even this revisionist scholarship remains underpinned by the assumption that Caillebotte was first and foremost a painter, and driven by the prioritization of painting. Daniel Charles’s scholarship on Caillebotte’s yachting offers an important, if partial, exception. Charles, Caillebotte; Daniel Charles and Eric Vibart, ‘L’architecte et son double’, in De Manet à Caillebotte. Les Impressionnistes à Gennevilliers, ed. Patrice Bachelard ([Paris]: Editions Plume, 1993); Daniel Charles, ‘Caillebotte et la navigation à voile’, in Caillebotte, sa vie et son œuvre. Catalogue raisonné des peintures et pastels, by Marie Berhaut (Paris: La Bibliothèque des Arts, Fondation Wildenstein, 1978), 23–8; Charles, ‘Caillebotte and Boating’. In this view, Caillebotte’s hobbies either distracted him from painting or offered him arenas in which to grapple with painterly problems in a different register. (Yachting was an expression and development of his feeling for abstract line; gardening was the arena in which Caillebotte experimented with Chevreul’s colour theory.) Fonsmark, ‘Midst’, 18; Marina Ferretti Bocquillon, ‘Gustave, peintre et jardinier’, in Caillebotte peintre et jardinier, cat. Marina Ferretti Bocquillon, Paula Luengo and Gilles Chardeau (Vanves: Éditions Hazan, 2016), 22. In making the case that we ought to take seriously Caillebotte’s diverse achievements on the grounds of their art historically hermeneutic value, Caillebotte’s multinodal, omnidirectional and decentred life of labours continues to be mischaracterized as being animated primarily by aesthetic questions and painterly problems. My intervention comes not only in decompartmentalizing Caillebotte’s many passions but also in attempting to account for their manifold lateral connections as being animated by psychological, social and ideological processes external to a strict understanding of art. 3 Varnedoe, Caillebotte, 4. 4 R. D. Beech, ‘Note on Caillebotte as a Philatelist’, in Gustave Caillebotte: The Unknown Impressionist, cat. Anne Distel, et al. (London: The Royal Academy of Arts, 1996), 206; Charles, Caillebotte; The Philatelic Record, 12, 203–4. 5 Charles, Caillebotte, 61. Martial married Marie Élisa Camille Azélie Minoret on 24 May 1887. ‘Contrat de mariage sous le régime de la communauté de biens avec donation au dernier vivant entre Martial Caillebotte, propriétaire, demeurant 31, boulevard Haussmann, et Marie Élisa Camille Azélie Minoret, sans profession, demeurant 10, rue de Rivoli. Mariage à la mairie du 4e arrondissement de Paris’ (Archives Nationales, 1887, MC/ET/CX/1143). Gustave was only introduced to the future Mme. Martial Caillebotte by his brother at dinner in March 1887. Letter from Gustave Caillebotte to Claude Monet, Paris (29 March), reprinted in Artcurial, ‘Archives Claude Monet, correspondances d’artiste, collection Monsieur et Madame Cornebois’ (Paris: Hôtel Dassault, 13 December 2006), 21 letter number 30. 6 Charles, Caillebotte, 62; Maurice Lévêque, ‘CAILLEBOTTE (Gustave), peintre français né en 1848, mort à Gennevilliers le 21 Février 1894’ (Recueil. Caillebotte, Gustave. Dossier documentaire réuni par la Bibliothèque Historique, Bibliothèque

 Notes 183 historique de la Ville de Paris, 4 BIO 02753); James A. Mackay, The Tapling Collection of Postage and Telegraph Stamps and Postal Stationary (London: The British Museum, 1964), 2. This is (very) roughly equivalent to something between €500,000 and €4,500,000 today, although this figure is given only as a broad indication to emphasize its remarkably high value. The Tapling-Caillebotte collection eventually ended up with the British Museum and, presently, with the British Library. 7 Dans l’intimité des frères, Lemoine, et al.; Gustave Caillebotte and Photography, Sagner, Hollein and Pohlmann. 8 The Philatelic Record, 12, 204. The study of Mexican stamps was originally published in Timbre-Poste; it was subsequently revised, substantially extended and translated into English for The Philatelic Record. [Gustave] Caillebotte and [Martial] Caillebotte, ‘The Stamps of Mexico’, in The Philatelic Record, 36 vols., vol. 7 (London: Stanley, Gibbons, and Co., 1885); ‘The Stamps of Mexico’, in The Philatelic Record, 36 vols., vol. 8 (London: Pemberton, Wilson, and Co., 1886). The following year, after praising their ‘excellent’ article W. Dorning Beckton was nevertheless able to supplement their catalogue with a number of new specimens. W. Dorning Beckton, ‘The Stamps of Mexico’, in The Philatelic Record, 36 vols, vol. 9 (London: Stanley, Gibbons, and Co., 1887), 158. See also Charles, Caillebotte, 61; ‘The Late M. Georges Caillebotte’, 61–2; ‘Société Française de Timbrologie. Séance du 8 février’, L’Ami des timbres. Journal catalogue des collectionneurs de timbres-poste, télégraphes et fiscaux, March 1883, 108. 9 The Philatelic Record, 36 vols., vol. 5 (London: Pemberton, Wilson, and Co., 1883), 209; The Philatelic Record, 36 vols., vol. 6 (London: Pemberton, Wilson, and Co., 1884), 223. 10 The Philatelic Record, 12, 204. 11 ‘Inventaire après décès de Céleste Daufresne, veuve de feu Martial Caillebotte …, le 28 octobre 1878: Etude C. Didier, G. Oury, H. Labaron, L. Theze, P. Narbey, successeurs de Me Poletnich’, Archives nationales, 1878, MC/ET/XXV/317; ‘Liquidation et partage des successions de Martial Caillebotte …, et de Céleste Daufresne, sa femme et de René Caillebotte, leur fils, le 11 décembre 1878: Etude C. Didier, G. Oury, H. Labaron, L. Theze, P. Narbey, successeurs de Me Poletnich’, Archives nationales, 1878, MC/ET/XXV/318; ‘Cahier des charges pour la vente d’un hôtel rue de Miromesnil, n°77, appartenant à Gustave Caillebotte, peintre, demeurant rue de Miromesnil, n°77, à Alfred Caillebotte, curé de l’église Saint-Georges, et à Martial Caillebotte, frères’, Archives nationales, 1879, MC/ET/XXV/319. 12 See Alfred Forbin, Catalogue de Timbres-Fiscaux (Amiens: Yvert & Tellier, 1915), 406–41. 13 Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Big Other doesn’t exist’, Journal of European Psychoanalysis 5 (1997). http:​//www​.psyc​homed​ia.it​/jep/​numbe​r5/zi​zek.h​tm; The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London and New York: Verso, 2008), 393. 14 Ticklish Subject, 393–4; In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2009), 22–3. 15 Eero Laine, ‘Bureaucracy’, in The Žižek Dictionary, ed. Rex Butler (Durham: Acumen, 2014), 22. 16 An official ritual that ensures passage between the two deaths: the first physical (real) and the second symbolic. The stamping of the documents made official the registration of death and dispersal of estates, an act of symbolic violence that erased Martial, Céleste and René Caillebotte from the symbolic, from existence in the eyes of the big Other, and therefore Gustave. The stamp thus betokened the closing of

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what Lacan terms the distance between the two deaths. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (London and New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), 320; Žižek, Ticklish Subject, 168; The Fragile Absolute, or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting for? (London and New York: Verso, 2000), 30. 17 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991), 164. 18 Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 72–4. 19 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, et al., vol. 18 (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955), 7–23; Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book III: The Psychoses 1955-1956, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 242. 20 Dylan Evans, ‘Repetition’, in An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, by Dylan Evans (London Routledge, 1996), 164. 21 Mitchell, Siblings. See also ‘The Law of the Mother: Sibling Trauma and the Brotherhood of War’, Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis 21, no. 1 (2013): 145–59; ‘Siblings: Thinking Theory’, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 67 (2013): 14–34. 22 Siblings, 42–3. 23 Ibid., 29. 24 Ibid., 43–4, 50–4. 25 Ibid., 120–9. 26 ‘Siblings: Thinking Theory’, 29. 27 Ibid., 24. 28 Siblings, 28–9. Emphasis hers. 29 Harrison, The Bourgeois Citizen, 51. 30 For Pomian collecting is an ‘anthropological event’, embedded within specific economic, social, cultural, geographical and historical circumstances. As such, the collection reflects not the individual’s ‘taste’ but instead an ‘attempt to create a link between the visible and the invisible’. By transforming useful things into meaningful objects (which he calls ‘semiophores’), the collector seeks to connect his tangible existence to that which his culture understands to be beyond the tangible (God, eternity, nature and so on). Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500-1800, trans. Elizabeth Wiles-Portier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 4–6, 26–7. 31 Harrison, The Bourgeois Citizen, 81–2. 32 Such as Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities; Susan M. Pearce, On Collecting. An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). For Belk’s critique of rational-actor models see Russell W. Belk, ‘The Ineluctable Mysteries of Possessions’, in To Have Possessions: A Handbook on Ownership and Property. A Special Issue of the Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 1991, Volume 6, No. 6, ed. Floyd W. Rudmin (Corte Madera: Select Press, 1991), 17–55; Collecting in a Consumer Society (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). 33 Honore de Balzac, Cousin Pons, trans. Herbert Hunt (New York: Viking Penguin, 1968); Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet, ed. Stéphanie Dord-Crouslé (Paris:

 Notes 185 Flammarion, 2008). Benjamin Lerner’s 1961 doctoral thesis exemplifies this line of thinking, whereby collecting is presumed to be symptomatic of some blockage to be accounted for and – implicitly – transcended. Benjamin Lerner, ‘Auditory and Visual Thresholds for the Perception of Words of Anal Connotation: An Evaluation of the “Sublimation Hypothesis” on Philatelists’ (Doctoral Thesis, Yeshiva University, 1961). In this case, the hypothesis is that unresolved childhood anal conflicts re-emerge as an over-valuation of objects and is consequently sublimated in collecting. Werner Muensterberger’s 1994 Collecting. An Unruly Passion, which adopts a Winnicottian view of collecting as a defensive mechanism, the creation of a fantasy world of transitional objects which can all-too-easily consume and destroy the subject, is, in many ways, the culmination of this strand of thinking. Werner Muensterberger, Collecting. An Unruly Passion. Psychological Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 34 Quotations in order from Michael Camille, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Other Objects of Desire. Collectors and Collecting Queerly, ed. Michael Camille and Adrian Rifkin (Malden: Blackwell, 2001), 2, 4. Rémy Saisselin represents an intermediary between these two polarities: while attempting to historicize the psychological phenomenon he investigates, the very title of the book indicates his failure to completely eradicate the problematic focus on abnormality, in this case mania. Rémy G. Saisselin, Bricabracomania: The Bourgeois and the Bibelot (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985). 35 For an ethical critique of Žižek’s symptomatology see Tim Dean, ‘Art as Symptom: Žižek and the Ethics of Psychoanalytic Criticism’, Diacritics 32, no. 2 (2002): 20–41. 36 Žižek, Sublime Object, 3. 37 ‘The symptom is itself structured like a language.’ Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (London and New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), 223. ‘The unconscious is structured like a language.’ The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality. The Limits of Love and Knowledge, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (London and New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), 48. See also Écrits, 223, 320; Seminar II, 320. 38 Écrits, 346. 39 Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XXIII: Le sinthome, 1975-1976, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Luke Thurston, Ornicar? 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 (1976–1977), Unpublished typescript. 40 Žižek conceptualizes antagonism as the real of the social, a constitutional and incessant disruption which makes harmonious and transparent social organizations impossible, and stimulates the drive for a fantasy of wholeness. In line with Laclau, Žižek argues that antagonism is a universal condition of disarray which characterizes every identity. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, please!’, in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek (London and New York: Verso, 2000), 91. As a result of the fact that there is no stable identity position, Žižek argues that ‘there is no class relationship’; there is no ‘normal’ way of organizing class relations, all class structures will ultimately fail to fix these antagonistic modalities of interclass relations. Lost Causes, 295. Each particular class structure or class antagonism is a defensive mechanism, designed to cope with the real of the universal class antagonism. Thus, class is not a positively existing entity but rather a modality of the real. In this way, class is the negative whose exclusion is the condition for the establishment of a positive order. Such

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a definition of class antagonism as real risks falling into the old Marxist trap of essentializing class struggle, and dismissing a spectrum of other (gender, sexuality, racial, nationalist) struggles as merely symptomatic epiphenomena of the universal class struggle. In his stance against the ‘theoretical retreat from the problems of domination within capitalism’, this seems to be a risk Žižek is willing to take. Wendy Brown, States of Injury (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 14. Quoted in ‘Class Struggle or Postmodernism?’, 97. Žižek argues that to not posit a universal struggle, to declare every universal to be false and thus to argue that there is not one, single, totalizing struggle is ‘precisely not political enough, in so far as it silently presupposes a non-thematized, “naturalized” framework of economic relations’. ‘Class Struggle or Postmodernism?’, 108. Since to dispense with a concept of universality is to secretly privilege some and disavow others, Žižek draws from Laclau and Hegel to posit a ‘concrete universality’ whereby the universal is reflexively and dialectically determined by its particular contents. Wendell Kisner, ‘Concrete Universality’, in The Žižek Dictionary, ed. Rex Butler (Durham: Acumen, 2014), 47. This theoretical position is indebted to the Gramscian notion of hegemony, inherited in modified form from Laclau and Mouffe. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London and New York: Verso, 2001), xii; Chantal Mouffe, ‘Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci’, in Gramsci and Marxist Theory, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 168–204; Matthew Sharpe, Slavoj Žižek: A Little Piece of the Real (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2004), 7. In this model, universality as such is an empty structural component which, when ‘filled out’ by a particular element (one that comes to ‘stand in’ for the universal), totalizes the social field such that the constellation of signifiers which constitute the social reality acquire meaning in relation to the new universal: as Laclau says, ‘The universal is an empty place, a void which can be filled only by the particular.’ Ernesto Laclau, ‘Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the Constitution of Political Logics’, in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek (London and New York: Verso, 2000), 58. Following this, Žižek and Laclau both agree that politics is the struggle for hegemony, that is the battle to have a specific particular to fulfil the function of a universal: the (hegemonic) universal is the site of struggle, always at war with itself, and thus, as such, characterized by blockages and fissures. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, 56–9; Žižek, ‘Class Struggle or Postmodernism?’, 113. The gaps in the universal, that is universality proper, can be viewed from the position of truth from the perspective of the ‘part of no part’ (the particular element within the universality that remains outside it). 41 It is in this frame that he finds Jacques Rancière’s notion of the sans-part most useful; on which see Raybone, ‘Notes Towards Practicing Žižekian Ideology Critique as an Art Historical Methodology’. 42 Žižek, Sublime Object, 77–80. 43 Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood in and out (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). 44 Benjamin, ‘Unpacking My Library’. 45 Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1996). 46 ‘Subjective Discourse or the Non-functional System of Objects’, in The Object Reader, ed. Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 51.

 Notes 187 47 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (London and New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), 45. 48 Seminar VII, 119; Seminar II, 80. 49 Baudrillard, System of Objects, 58. 50 I am not the first to identify the strong correlation between Žižek’s Marxist-Lacanian theory of ideology and the subject-constituting power of objects in a collection. Rey Chow has articulated how Benjamin’s intervention into the Marxist discourse on objects represents a vital rehabilitation of the love of things, recasting it as an expression of historical materialism. Rey Chow, ‘Fateful Attachments: On Collecting, Fidelity, and Lao She’, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 296. On this see, for example, Walter Benjamin, ‘Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian’, in Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols., vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002). For Chow, Žižek’s theory of ideology serves as a useful tool for thinking about the motif of collecting in Lao She’s writing in relation to Chinese nationalism. However, for our purposes, her most significant point is that it is only in this post-Benjamin Marxist landscape that Žižek is able to articulate the subject-producing power of objects. Mieke Bal outlines her 1994 ‘Narrative Perspective on Collecting’ with reference to Žižek’s account of this subject-producing power. Mieke Bal, ‘Telling Objects: A Narrative Perspective on Collecting’, in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 97–115. She highlights how, through the organization of objects into a more or less coherent structure, a semiotic system analogous to narrative, collecting is fundamentally a process of fleshing-out one’s subjectivity by means of its narrativization. It is through the fundamental substructure of fetishism that Bal connects her purely semiotic process with the psychological terrain of desire. 51 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), ix. 52 Ibid., xii. 53 Ibid., 151–69. 54 Ibid., 158–9. Quote on ibid., 159. 55 Ibid. 56 L. N. Williams, Fundamentals of Philately (Bellefonte: American Philatelic Society, 1990), 25. 57 Ibid. 58 Wittmer, Garden, 272. 59 Lionello Venturi, Les Archives de l’Impressionnisme. Lettres de Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley et autres. Mémoires de Paul Durand-Ruel. Documents, 2 vols., vol. 1 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), 42. 60 Letter from Gustave Caillebotte to Camille Pissarro, (Paris) 28 January 1878, reprinted in Michael Howard, ed. The Impressionists by Themselves. A Selection of their Paintings, Drawings and Sketches with Extracts from their Writings (London: Conran Octopus, 1991), 93. Letter from Gustave Caillebotte to Claude Monet, (c. 1879); letter from Gustave Caillebotte to Claude Monet, Trouville, July–August 1884; letter from Gustave Caillebotte to Claude Monet, (c. 1894?) respectively reprinted in ‘Archives Claude Monet’, 14 letter number 17, 20 letter number 27, 25 letter number

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40. Letter from Gustave Caillebotte to Camille Pissarro, (summer 1879) reprinted in Berhaut, Caillebotte: catalogue raisonné, 275 letter 222. See also Wittmer, Garden, 273; Pietri, ‘Introduction’, viii. 61 Kathleen Adler, Unknown Impressionists (Oxford: Phaidon, 1988), 80. 62 Berhaut, Caillebotte: catalogue raisonné, 12. 63 Charles, Caillebotte, 17–18; Varnedoe, ‘Odd Man In’, 13. 64 Wittmer, Garden, 273. 65 Bertrand Tillier, ‘Gérôme et la « cochonnerie » impressionniste’, Revista de História da Arte e Arqueologia 16 (2011): 61–2; Varnedoe, Caillebotte, 198. 66 For more on the Caillebotte Affair see Berhaut, ‘Le legs Caillebotte’; Vaisse, ‘Le legs Caillebotte d’après les documents’; ‘L’Affaire Caillebotte n’a pas eu lieu’, Le Figaro, 12 January 1983; Berhaut and Vaisse, ‘Le legs Caillebotte; Annexe’; Varnedoe, Caillebotte, 198–202. 67 Stewart, On Longing, 151. 68 Ibid. 69 Jules Richemont, 1879. 100 × 81 cm, oil on canvas. Private Collection; Portrait de Richard Gallo, 1881. 97.2 × 116.6 cm, oil on canvas. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Jules Dubois, 1885. 117 × 89 cm, oil on canvas. Private Collection. 70 Marrinan, Caillebotte, 184. 71 Ibid., 25. 72 Marrinan speculates that Charlotte was an actress, dancer or courtesan. Ibid. 73 Edgar Degas, Femme sortant du bain, c. 1876. 16 × 21.5 cm, pastel on monotype. Musée d’Orsay, RF 12255; Edgar Degas, Les choristes, 1877. 27 × 32 cm, pastel on monotype. Musée d’Orsay, RF 12259. 74 Marrinan, Caillebotte, 259–60. 75 Garb, ‘Caillebotte’s Male Figures’, 33. 76 The Philatelic Record, 12, 203. 77 Dylan Evans, ‘Acting Out’, in An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, by Dylan Evans (London Routledge, 1996), 2–3. 78 Berhaut, Caillebotte: catalogue raisonné, 12. 79 Letter from Gustave Caillebotte to Claude Monet, (c. 1894?) reprinted in ‘Archives Claude Monet’, 25 letter 40. 80 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (London and New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), 103. 81 Callen, The Work of Art, 26. 82 Charles, ‘Caillebotte and Boating’, 116.

Chapter 3 1 (Est-ce bien un « impressionniste » que M. Caillebotte ?) Charles Bigot, ‘Causerie artistique: L’Exposition des impressionnistes’, La Revue politique et littéraire, 28 April 1877, 1047. 2 Stewart, On Longing, 153. 3 Fonsmark, ‘Midst’, 13; Charles, ‘Caillebotte and Boating’, ibid., 112.

 Notes 189 4 Sagner, ‘Caillebotte and Photography’, 16–17; Dans l’intimité des frères, Lemoine, et al.; Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography (London: Allen Lane, 1968), 176; Varnedoe, Caillebotte, 13; Caillebotte: A Retrospective, Varnedoe and Lee, 17; ‘Les dessins de Gustave Caillebotte’, 7; Elisabeth Couturier, ‘Caillebotte “photographe haussmannien”’, Historia, April 2005, 84–7; Lobstein, ‘Yerres et Caillebotte’, 33–6. Darragon offers a rare counterpoint: Darragon, Caillebotte, 59. 5 Max Hollein, ‘Foreword’, in Gustave Caillebotte: An Impressionist and Photography, cat. Karin Sagner, Max Hollein and Ulrich Pohlmann (Munich: Hermer, 2012), 9. 6 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1990), 1–3. 7 Ibid., 9. 8 Ibid., 13. 9 Tony Bennett, ‘The Exhibitionary Complex’, New Formations, no. 4 (1988): 73–102. 10 Ibid., 79. It was for this reason that the Naturalist aesthetic, which drew extensively and clandestinely from photographic technologies for the specifics of its up-to-date snapshot-like quality, was so attractive to the Third Republican state: Naturalist painting was a seemingly transparent and objective conduit through which society could be (re)presented to itself in terms directly and indirectly set by the state. Naturalist painting was attractive to the popular audience of late nineteenth-century France because it facilitated a phantasmic illusion of executive control over the sociopolitical landscape within which one lived one’s life. Caillebotte’s paintings of modern Parisian life mark an attempt to figure the forms, spaces and behaviours of a rapidly modernizing society in a visual language whose terms were intimately wrapped up in those very processes of change. 11 Crary, Techniques, 13. 12 Patrick Joyce, The State of Freedom: A Social History of the British State since 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 53–184. 13 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital 1848-1875 (London: Abacus, 2008), 64–87. 14 Kirk Varnedoe and Peter Galassi, ‘Caillebotte’s Space’, in Gustave Caillebotte, by Kirk Varnedoe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 20–5; Peter Galassi, ‘Caillebotte’s Method’, ibid., 27–40. 15 Varnedoe and Galassi, ‘Caillebotte’s Space’, 20. 16 Ibid. 17 Galassi, ‘Caillebotte’s Method’, 27, 40. 18 Ibid., 38–9. 19 Sagner, ‘Caillebotte and Photography’, 16–17; Chardeau, Les dessins de Caillebotte, 12. In a footnote, Karin Sagner cites (without giving a page reference) ‘information from’ Siulolovao Challons-Lipton’s study of Léon Bonnat’s atelier according to which Caillebotte is reported to have owned a large and now-lost collection of photographs. Sagner, ‘Caillebotte and Photography’, 18 note 12; Siulolovao Challons-Lipton, The Scandinavian Pupils of the Atelier Bonnat 1867-1894 (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2001). As the trail seems to end here, it is only possible to speculate as to the veracity of this claim, as well as about what this supposed collection constituted, how it was arranged or utilized by Caillebotte and how it functioned in relation to the other elements of his visual economy. It would certainly not have been out of the ordinary for a painter at this time to have had a set of photographs; the mere fact of Caillebotte’s possession of one, given the lack of specific information about

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it, thus only confirms rather than develops the general and, in my view problematic, connection between Caillebotte and the photographic zeitgeist. 20 Anne de Mondenard, ‘Visions de peintres, regards de photographes: histoires croisées’, in Dans l’intimité des frères Caillebotte, peintre et photographe, cat. Serge Lemoine, et al. (Paris: Skira Flammarion, 2011), 31; Urban Impressionist, Distel, et al., 38. 21 Quotation from Julien Faure-Cornoton, ‘La mémoire des jours: l’œuvre photographique de Martial Caillebotte’, in Dans l’intimité des frères Caillebotte, peintre et photographe, cat. Serge Lemoine, et al. (Paris: Skira Flammarion, 2011), 44. Éric Darragon, ‘Gustave Caillebotte, une nouvelle peinture’, ibid., 35; Dominique Bussillet, Maupassant et l’univers de Caillebotte (Cabourg: Éditions Cahiers du Temps, 2010), 99. This muddling of chronology and causation is resolved unsatisfactorily by arguments which state that Caillebotte ‘anticipate[d] a photographic view’. Sagner, ‘Caillebotte and Photography’, 17. 22 As I have argued, Caillebotte’s connections to philately have been curiously underplayed, R. D. Beech’s small note on the matter notwithstanding. Beech, ‘Caillebotte as a Philatelist’. 23 Jean Chardeau notes the ‘very scholarly fashion in which Gustave Caillebotte worked before the execution of his paintings’. Chardeau, Les dessins de Caillebotte, 12. See also Sagner, ‘Caillebotte and Photography’, 18. 24 Camille Lemonnier, ‘L’Art à l’Exposition universelle – Ceux qui n’exposent pas’, L’Artiste, 31 August 1878; Mario Proth, Voyage au pays des peintres: Salon de 1877 (Paris: Vaton, 1877), 8. Quoted in Young, Realism, 78. 25 Le Sémaphore de Marseille [Emile Zola], ‘Lettres de Paris: Autre correspondance’, 1. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 108–9. 26 (… une véritable science de dessin et d’arrangement, et une force de coloris remarquable, quoique avec des effets très simples et nuances très sobres.) L.G., ‘Le Salon des “impressionnistes”’, La Presse, 6 April 1877, 2. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 147–8. 27 (M. Caillebotte a des qualités réelles ; ses personnages sont bien campés; la perspective est bonne.) Jacques, ‘Menu propos: Exposition impressionniste’, L’Homme libre, 12 April 1877, 1–2. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 156–8. 28 (une précision inouïe) E. Lepelletier, ‘Les Impressionnistes’, Le Radical, 8 April 1877, 2–3. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 158–9. 29 Richard Thomson, Art of the Actual: Naturalism and Style in Early Third Republic France, 1880-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 120. 30 Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), 8, 230. 31 See ibid., 8–10, 230–74, 277–321. 32 Quotation from ibid., 279. 33 Fried, ‘Caillebotte’s Impressionism’, 86; Boime, Commune, 77–82; Sagraves, ‘The Street’, 95–8; Sagner, ‘Caillebotte and Photography’, 21; Shackelford, ‘Middle’, 40; Darragon, Caillebotte, 134; Berhaut, ‘Introduction’, 17; Varnedoe and Galassi, ‘Caillebotte’s Space’; Fonsmark, ‘Midst’, 13; Peter Bürger, ‘Media Differences: Caillebotte and Maupassant as Storytellers’, ibid., 27; Mary Morton et al., ‘Parisian Perspectives’, in Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye, cat. Mary Morton and George T. M. Shackelford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 124–7; Mary Morton, ‘Caillebotte in Contemporary Criticism’, ibid., 62.

 Notes 191 34 Ghez, ‘Caillebotte’s Pont de l’Europe’; Varnedoe, ‘Caillebotte’s Pont de l’Europe’, 17; Broude, ‘Outing Impressionism’, 121; Shackelford, ‘Middle’, 40. 35 Anthony Sutcliffe, ‘The Impressionists and Haussmann’s Paris’, French Cultural Studies 6, no. 17 (1995): 205. In opposition to the alignment of Impressionism with Haussmannization made by writers such as R. L. Herbert, Albert Boime, Paul Tucker and Virginia Spate, Clare A. P. Willsdon identifies in Impressionism not the unequivocal espousal for Haussmann’s values of modern renewal but rather a kind of ‘Baudelairean’ nostalgia for what was lost. As such, they tended to avoid painting those areas most associated with Haussmann’s Paris, be they the steel-bridges of the Europe quarter, or Haussmann’s new gardens, among them the ‘Imperial fantasy’ park of Buttes-Chaumont. Clare A. P. Willsdon, ‘“Promenades et plantations”: Impressionism, Conservation and Haussmann’s Reinvention of Paris’, in Soil and Stone: Impressionism, Urbanism, Environment, ed. Frances Fowle and Richard Thomson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 110–14. See Herbert, Impressionism; Virginia Spate, The Colour of Time: Claude Monet (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 69–128; Gary Tinterow and Henri Loyrette, Origins of Impressionism (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1994), 288; Boime, Commune; Paul Hayes Tucker, Monet at Argenteuil (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 59–62. 36 Marrinan, ‘Deep Focus’, 28. 37 (… je prétends que la majeure partie des exposants de la rue Le Peletier a usurpé le titre d’impressionnistes. Est-il impressionniste, par exemple, M. Caillebotte [… ?]) Roger Ballu, ‘L’Exposition des peintres impresionnistes’, La Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, 14 April 1877, 392. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 125–7. ([Caillebotte] sait suffisamment peindre pour que nous lui conseillions de quitter prochainement les impressionnistes, s’il ne veut être quitté par eux.) Bernadille [Victor Fournel], ‘Chronique parisienne: L’Exposition des impressionnistes’, Le Français, 13 April 1877, 2. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 129–31. 38 La Petite République française, ‘Exposition des impressionnistes: 6, rue Le Peletier’, La Petite République française, 10 April 1877, 2. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 175–6. 39 Ph. B, ‘Exposition des impressionistes’, Le République française, 25 April 1877, 3. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 123–5. A. P., ‘Beaux-Arts’, Le Petit Parisien, 7 April 1877, 2. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 173–4. 40 (Est-ce bien un « impressionniste » que M. Caillebotte ?) Bigot, ‘Causerie artistique’. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 132–6. 41 Speaking of Le dimanche, près de Saint-Philippe-du-Roule in the context of Béraud’s entire career, Le Temps felt that ‘Jean Béraud appears as a historian. We can talk about the plastic value of his paintings to put into doubt their painterly qualities, but one cannot contest the observation that dictates them and their undeniable documentary value.’ (Jean Béraud apparaît comme un historiographe. On peut discuter sur la valeur plastique de ses tableaux, mettre en doubte leurs qualités picturales, mais on ne saurait contester l’observation qui les dicte et leur valeur documentaire est indéniable.) Le Temps, ‘Nécrologie. Jean Béraud’, Le Temps, 8 October 1935, 4. L. Roger-Milés likewise felt that Béraud’s treatment of ‘an exit from mass’ was ‘finely observed’, and possessing of a ‘parisianisme’, an eye for what was specific to the Parisian experience, ‘that no other painter of that era – 1877 – had supplied with such acuity’ (… une sortie de messe d’une observation très fine, et d’une parisianisme qu’aucun peintre à cette époque – 1877 – n’avait fourni avec autant

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d’acuité …) L. Roger-Milés, ‘Jean Béraud’, Revue illustrée, 15 June 1893, 193. Mario Proth felt that Béraud had gone overboard with his descriptive realism, branding Le dimanche ‘much too photographic’. Proth, Voyage, 132. Quoted in Young, Realism, 79. 42 ‘Béraud himself was perfectly at home in high society’. Georges Bernier, ‘Introduction’, in Jean Béraud 1849-1935. The Belle Époque: A Dream of Times Gone By. A Catalogue Raisonné, by Patrick Offenstadt, Nicole Castais and Pierre Suarisse (Köln: Taschen Verlag, 1999), 23. 43 Patrick Offenstadt, Nicole Castais and Pierre Suarisse, Jean Béraud 1849-1935. The Belle Époque: A Dream of Times Gone By. A Catalogue Raisonné (Köln: Taschen Verlag, 1999), 45, 48. 44 It must be said that there is no direct evidence that Bastien-Lepage used photographs, although his Naturalist peers including Dagnan, contemporaneous critics and contemporary scholars including Gabriel Weisberg, all noted the very strong probability that he did. Gabriel P. Weisberg and Jean-François Rauzier, ‘Photography as Illusionary Aid: Constructing Reality’, in Illusions of Reality: Naturalist Painting, Photography, Theatre and Cinema, 1875-1918, cat. Gabriel P. Weisberg (Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2010), 31–43. 45 Gabriel P. Weisberg, Beyond Impressionism: The Naturalist Impulse in European Art 1860-1905 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 22–4; Thomson, Art of the Actual, 123. This sense that photography was a documentary tool that could be leveraged to preserve national patrimony, exemplified by the past example of the 1851 Missions Héliographiques, remained current with Naturalist painting, which was encouraged to record historic events in its precise and scientific manner to preserve them for future generations. Ibid., 57–63. 46 Weisberg, Beyond Impressionism, 7–8; Edwin Becker and Gabriel P. Weisberg, ‘Introducing Naturalism’, in Illusions of Reality: Naturalist Painting, Photography, Theatre and Cinema, 1875-1918, cat. Gabriel P. Weisberg (Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2010), 13; Gabriel P. Weisberg, ‘Reframing Naturalism’, ibid., 20; Thomson, Art of the Actual, 95. For more on the salience of consumption as the performance of taste and with regard to political philosophy and gender identities in the late nineteenth century see Lisa Tiersten, Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-Siècle France (Berkeley, London and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001). 47 Weisberg and Rauzier, ‘Constructing Reality’, 41. 48 Young, Realism, 1–12, 212–14. Jennifer L. Shaw likewise argues that ‘the nineteenth century was characterized by the perception that the tempo of life had accelerated’. Jennifer L. Shaw, ‘French Landscape Painting and Modern Life’, in Paris and the Countryside: Modern Life in Late-19th-Century-France, cat. Carrie Haslett, Gabriel P. Weisberg and Jennifer L. Shaw (Portland and Maine: Portland Museum of Art, 2006), 63. See also Thomson, Art of the Actual, 126; André Dombrowski, ‘History, Memory, and Instantaneity in Edgar Degas’s Place de la Concorde’, The Art Bulletin 93, no. 2 (2011): 195–219. 49 Weisberg and Rauzier, ‘Constructing Reality’, 32. See also Weisberg, Beyond Impressionism, 274. It was thus not that case, as Hans Rooseboom and John Rudge argue, that ‘photography played no part’ in artistic discourse but rather that it functioned to structure the very discursive ground of art criticism. Hans Rooseboom and John Rudge, ‘Myths and Misconceptions: Photography and Painting in the

 Notes 193 Nineteenth Century’, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 32, no. 4 (2006): 300. 50 Béraud rarely dated his own paintings: consequently, most posthumous dating can only be approximate. See Offenstadt, Castais and Suarisse, Béraud, 7. The painting is conserved at the Musée Carnavalet, CARP1735. 51 This association of ‘image’ and ‘writing’ became increasingly prevalent and important as the last decades of the nineteenth century progressed. Phillip Dennis Cate, ‘Prints Abound. Paris in the 1890s’, in Prints Abound: Paris in the 1890s. From the Collections of Virginia and Ira Jackson and the National Gallery of Art, cat. Phillip Dennis Cate, Richard Thomson and Gale B. Murray (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, 2000), 24. 52 Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1998). 53 Crary, Techniques, 132. 54 Ulrich Pohlmann, ‘“Everything as though under a magic spell”. The Depiction of Street Life in Nineteenth-Century Photographs’, in Gustave Caillebotte: An Impressionist and Photography, cat. Karin Sagner, Max Hollein and Ulrich Pohlmann (Munich: Hermer, 2012), 140. 55 Stephan Bann understands the concept of the ‘visual economy’ as signifying the sum total of all means of visual representation available. In my attempts to understand the connections that existed between the various forms of Caillebotte’s creative practices, many of which were fundamentally representational, this notion is key. Stephen Bann, Distinguished Images: Prints in the Visual Economy of Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), 19. 56 Mackay, Tapling Collection, 2. Caillebotte was frequently referred to as Georges by the philatelic presses in France and England. 57 Fred J. Melville, ‘Our National Stamp Collection’, The Connoisseur: An Illustrated Magazine for Collectors, 1901, 37. 58 On the nineteenth-century schools of philately, see Williams, Fundamentals of Philately, 1–24. Williams identifies a diachronic, as well as geographical, dimension. For the first stamp collectors of the mid-to-late 1850s, the goal was to ‘form a representative collection of as many different stamps as were in existence and could be obtained’. Ibid., 1. In pursuing such completeness, the collector necessarily abhorred duplication: his goal was to collect a single example of each design. However, ‘a new trend from France’ emerged in the 1860s, whereby the physical attributes and condition of the stamp became objects of study in the same register as the printed design: ‘In the search for differences between one stamp and the next, [the collector] was not only to have regard for the design but also to inspect the backs, the edges and the hues or colors of stamps.’ Ibid., 4. The goal of this new breed of collector was to amass not just a representative sample of each design but all the known varieties of each design: variations on the ground of colour, hue or tint; type of paper; watermarking; perforation status and so on. Ibid., 5. See also Luís Eugénio Ferreira, A Certain Look at Philately (Braga: Edições Húmus Ldª, 2006), 27–43. 59 Such an orthogonal arrangement does not deviate from standard practice. See for example Album complet de timbres-poste, cartes postales, cartes-télégramme, enveloppes, bandes, mandats, etc. (Nouvelle édition illustrée de 88 armoiries d’Etats...) (Paris: A. Lenègre, 1887), 5; Album de l’amateur de timbres-postes, Second ed. (Paris: L.-N. Tripon, 1872), 29.

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60 Mackay, Tapling Collection, 5–6. 61 On plating see Fred J. Melville, All about Postage Stamps (London: T. Werner Laurie, [1913]), 12. 62 Indeed, as Stephan Bann notes, this is a possibility shared with the rest of print culture: ‘The multiplicity in print production does not ensure that all the copies will be uniform and interchangeable.’ Bann, Distinguished Images, 12. 63 Melville, Stamps, 12–13. See also Williams, Fundamentals of Philately, 12. 64 The Philatelic Record, 12, 203. 65 W. Dennis Way, All about Stamps (London and Glasgow: Collins, [1939]), 17. 66 Mauritz Hallgren, All about Stamps. Their History & the Art of Collecting Them (New York and London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940), 244. 67 From the 1860s onwards, collectors scrutinized the physical properties of the stamp, no longer content, as they had been the decade before, to experience it as a ‘pure’ image. Williams, Fundamentals of Philately, 1–4. 68 André Dombrowski, ‘The Cut and Shuffle: Card Playing in Cézanne’s Card Players’, in Modernist Games: Cézanne and His Card Players, ed. Satish Padiyar (London: Courtauld Books Online, 2013), 35–67. 69 Lucien d’Elne, ‘Les Timbres-Poste’, in Le Journal de la jeunesse. Nouveau recueil hebdomadaire illustré, vol. January–June (Paris: Librairie Hachette & Cie, 1891), 271. 70 In The Post Card, Jacques Derrida considers the erotic dimension of stamps in relation to communication and distinguishes between the ‘sender’s love’ of stamps and the ‘collector’s love’ of stamps. In the case of the former, the stamp facilitates a profoundly bodily relation between individuals, secured by the exchange of saliva carried on the back of the postage stamp: indeed, the very essence of the ‘gift’ to whose transportation the postage stamp is essential is not the personal inscription, nor even the design of the stamp, but precisely the bodily fluid captured by the adhesive compound on the reverse of the postage stamp. In this way, the sender communicates by the purchase and licking of postage stamps. In contrast, the collector never licks his stamps, foreclosing the bodily aspect; his relation is thus an anally retentive hoarding of printed images. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card. From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1987), 110; Peter Chametzky, Objects as History in TwentiethCentury German Art: Beckmann to Beuys (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2010), 101. For my critique of anal retention as a paradigm for understanding the psyche of the collector, see my earlier discussion of Benjamin Lerner’s 1961 doctoral thesis. 71 Davis, Visual Culture, 286–321. On Kubler ibid., 296–7; George Kubler, The Shape of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962). 72 Jennifer Dyer, Serial Images: The Modern Art of Iteration, International Studies in Hermaneutics and Phenomenology, Vol. 4 (Zurich and Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011). 73 ‘A series is minimally defined as asymmetrical [aRb ⇒ bRa], transitive [(aRb ∧ bRc) ⇒ aRc], connected [∀ a, b: aRb ⊕ bRa] and irreflexive [∀ a: aRa]’. Ibid., 1 note 1, 2. Notation mine. 74 Ibid., 21. 75 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Grids’, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, by Rosalind Krauss (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1984), 8–22; ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde’, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and

 Notes 195 Other Modernist Myths, by Rosalind Krauss (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1984), 151–70. Quote from ‘Grids’, 8. 76 ‘Grids’, 8. 77 ‘Originality’, 160. Emphasis hers. 78 Ibid., 162. 79 Ibid., 166. 80 ‘Grids’, 15. 81 Dyer, Serial Images, 9. 82 ‘La Poste considère les timbres comme formant une série’. Jean-François Brun et al., Le patrimoine du timbre-poste français (Charenton-le-Pont: Flohic Éditions, 1998), 54. 83 Even when going beyond the intentional remit of the ‘official’ series by including errata stamps, the collector nevertheless aims at a ‘completeness’ that is isomorphic to the now-scattered series of actually produced stamps.

Chapter 4 1 ‘The Late M. Georges Caillebotte’, 61. Emphasis mine. 2 ‘Oscillant entre un style réaliste et une touche plus libre, entre les ambiances des romans naturalistes et les grand thèmes impressionnistes … entre tradition et modernité.’ Juliane Cosandier, ‘Caillebotte. Au cœur de l’impressionnisme’, in Caillebotte. Au cœur de l’impressionnisme (Lausanne: La Bibliothèque des Arts, 2005), 11. 3 Krauss, ‘Grids’, 15. 4 Photographs, for example, which dramatized this material rupture by showcasing the devastation to buildings were not only popular, but also the only photographs of the Commune to avoid censorship and repression in the Third Republic before the 1880s. See Donald E. English, ‘Anxiety and the Official Censorship of the Photographic Image, 1850–1900’, Yale French Studies 122 (2012): 108–14; Bertrand Tillier and Donald Nicholson-Smith, ‘The Impact of Censorship on Painting and Sculpture, 1851-1914’, ibid., 81–2. See also Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, ‘Public Commemoration and Private Memory: Félix Bracquemond vis-à-vis the Siege of Paris and the Commune’, Getty Research Journal 5 (2013): 73–88. 5 In his 1995 Art and the French Commune Albert Boime argued that a large part of the bourgeoisie’s fear of the Commune stemmed not from its alien reorganization of society but rather from its recognizable and ordered harmony: in many ways the Commune enacted the cross-class social harmony that animated the rhetoric of the Versaillais. He cites the photographs of Bruno Auguste Braquehais as evidence for the Commune’s articulation of social harmony achieved through the rejection of rigid class hierarchy. Photographs such as Colonne Vendôme à terre, Gardes nationaux et curieux sur la colonne Vendôme renversée le 16 mai 1871 and Federes before the Vendome Column during the Commune, 1871, which Boime sees as condensing a profound sympathy for the goals of the Commune, express a radically new form of social order. Boime, Commune, 15. 6 Lehning, To Be a Citizen, 59–60. 7 Ibid., 61.

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8 Mayeur and Rebérioux, Third Republic, 8. Seize Mai 1876 was a constitutional and political crisis in which the royalist president MacMahon dismissed the Opportunist Republican government of Jules Simon in favour of the Moral Order duc de Broglie; the issue at hand was the interpretation of the recently passed constitutional laws, with MacMahon favouring increased authority for the position of President, and the Republican-dominated Chamber of Deputies advocating for parliamentary predominance. Consequently, the Chamber refused to support de Broglie’s government, to which MacMahon duly responded by dissolving it. At the subsequent elections the Republicans won a sizeable majority: the public had rejected the attempted Monarchist coup and MacMahon was forced to resign. Ibid., 28–9. 9 Mieke Bal makes precisely this point. Bal, ‘Telling Objects’, 97–115. 10 As Donald M. Reid has argued, postage stamps are ‘excellent primary sources for the symbolic messages which governments seek to convey to their citizens and to the world’, and a field which has received scant historical attention. Donald M. Reid, ‘The Symbolism of Postage Stamps: A Source for Historians’, Journal of Contemporary History 19, no. 2 (1984): 223. Lynn Hunt’s seminal 1984 Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, especially the chapter on ‘Symbolic Forms of Political Practice’, provides a valuable model for thinking about the relationship between such elements of seemingly abstract symbolism and the mundane exercise of state power. Excavating the equivocations evident in visual forms and their use, Hunt argues, highlights the contingency of apparently stable political categories and unmasks the ideological gambit of ‘timeless authority’. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2004), 52–86. 11 The symbolic saturation of the obliteration mark as a synecdoche for all the work of the post was to resurface during the strike of postmen during Mai 1968. See, for example, Soutenez la grève des postiers, Atelier des Beaux arts, 1968. 58 × 45 cm, poster. Bibliothèque nationale de France, ENT QB-1 (1968,7)-FT6. 12 ‘L’Émission des Bons de Poste’, Bulletin de la Ville de Paris: journal administratif, littéraire, commercial et financier, 27 November 1882, 506; ‘Informations’, Le XIXe siècle: journal quotidien politique et littéraire, 25 September 1882, 2; ‘Untitled’, Figaro: journal non politique, 19 September 1882, 1. 13 It was only in his late masterpiece, Régates à Argenteuil (Figure 3.3), that Caillebotte would so successfully recapture the synthesizing and totalizing capacities of painting informed by collecting. 14 Brun et al., Le patrimoine du timbre-poste, 11; Clotilde Brégeau and Laurence Jankowski de Niewmierzycki, Le patrimoine de La Poste (Charenton-le-Pont: Flohic Éditions, 1996), 12. 15 Brun et al., Le patrimoine du timbre-poste, 10–47; Brégeau and Jankowski de Niewmierzycki, Le patrimoine de La Poste, 10–91. 16 Le patrimoine de La Poste, 92. 17 Ibid. 18 Melville, Stamps, 70–2. 19 Brun et al., Le patrimoine du timbre-poste, 48. 20 Melville, Stamps, 86–90. The only ruler of the period who apparently objected to having his effigy printed on stamps was the King of Sicily in 1859, on the grounds that he strongly objected to having his likeness obliterated. (The cancellation of stamps is, of course, a routine part of their functional life.) Ivan F. Trinder notes, however, that ‘he did not mind people moistening the backs of the stamps in the

 Notes 197 usual way’. Ivan F. Trinder, All about Stamps, Do You Know (London: Perry Colour Books, [1952]), 16. 21 Fred J. Melville, The Postage Stamp in War (London: Fred J. Melville, 1915), 50–1. 22 Caillebotte and Caillebotte, ‘The Stamps of Mexico’ (1885); ‘The Stamps of Mexico’ (1886). 23 See especially Tapling Collection, Mexico Sheets 10, 28, 30. Stamp Album Sheets. British Library, Philatelic Collections. 24 (Longtemps ces braves et intelligents Chinois ont été regardés comme des Egyptiens modernes, inventeurs supérieurs … Il parait que Son Excellence chinoise a été émerveillée de la rapidité et de l’exactitude de notre système postal. Elle aurait appris avec non moins de plaisir que d’étonnement qu’une lettre écrite de Paris à Pékin ne mettait que quarante jours de voyage et ne dépassait que 80 centimes.) 25 Maxime du Camp, Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde motié du XIXe siècle, 6 vols., vol. 1 (Paris: Hachette, 1875), 83; Guide général ou Catalogue indicateur de Paris, indispensable aux visiteurs et aux exposants / [Exposition universelle de 1867, à Paris] (Paris: Au siège de l’Administration, 1867), 15–16; Adolphe Joanne, Paris: nouveau guide de l’étranger et du Parisien (Paris: Hachette, 1867), xx; Michel Melot, ‘Le tirage spécial de l’Exposition universelle de 1867’, Timbres magazine, October 2003, 37–40. 26 Julien Turgan, Études sur l’Exposition universelle, 1867 (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1867), 15. 27 du Camp, Paris, 1, 27–92. 28 Ibid., 40. 29 Ibid., 74–6, 75 note 71. 30 (un vaste monument). Ibid., 84. Direction générale des Postes. Instruction générale sur le service des Postes. Deuxième édition, Second ed. (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1876), 140. 31 Melville, The Postage Stamp in War, 77. 32 Around 40,000 letters could be sent this way per pigeon. Ibid., 81–2. 33 Ibid., 82. 34 Brun et al., Le patrimoine du timbre-poste, 106; Melville, The Postage Stamp in War, 83. 35 Brégeau and Jankowski de Niewmierzycki, Le patrimoine de La Poste, 182. 36 Ibid., 92. 37 Sébastien Richez, ‘Le facteur rural des postes en France avant 1914: un nouveau médiateur au travail’, Le Mouvement Social 218, no. 1 (2007): 29–44. 38 (Cet homme errant qui porte Képi bleu,/Bleu sarreau,/Et va de porte en porte,/ Cherchant un numéro,/Toujours aux mêmes heures/Exact à son devoir,/Dispense en nos demeures soit/crainte,/Soit espoir./Voyez dans sa cassette,/Comme il sait bien ranger/La lettre et la gazette/La France et l’étranger./Discret dépositaire,/Il tient dans ses casiers/Les actes du notaire/Et l’or des financiers./D’un pas leste il chemine/De la ferme au hameau,/S’arrête à la chaumine,/Un peu jase au château./ On l’aime, et sur la route/Il est partout fêté:/Parfois s’il boit la goutte,/C’est par civilité./Il jette à son passage/L’avis du créancier,/Le triste et dur message/Du juge ou de l’huissier,/A la maman craintive/Qui baise le papier,/Il donne la missive/ Du mousse ou de troupier.) Laurent Delcasso, Recueil de morceaux de chant... à l’usage des écoles... Paroles de M. Delcasso,... musique arrangée par M. Gross (Strasbourg: Dérivaux, 1869), 23.

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39 (Cahiers de modelés d’écriture qui contiennent, comme exemples, des adresses de lettres correctes et régulières) du Camp, Paris, 1, 77. 40 Charles Joliet, ‘Curiosités Microscopiques’, in Le Journal de la jeunesse. Nouveau recueil hebdomadaire illustré, vol. January–June (Paris: Librairie Hachette & Cie, 1881). 41 Lucien d’Elne, ‘Les Timbres-Poste’, vols. January–June (1890); January–June (1891); January–June (1892); January–June (1893); July–December (1893); January–June (1894). 42 (la collection des timbres-poste … peut devenir, dis-je, un véritable instrument d’éducation.) ‘Les Timbres-Poste’ (1891), 107. 43 See also ‘Les Timbres-Poste’ (1890), 382–4; ‘Les Timbres-Poste’ (1891), 106–7, 222–4; ‘L’Histoire de Christophe Colomb’ (1893), 182–4. 44 (d’excellentes « leçons des choses ») ‘Les Timbres-Poste’ (1891), 139. 45 Rapport de la Commission des Musées Scolaires d’Art, December 1883. AN F/17/1478 [Collection des circulaires du grand maître de l’Université et du Ministre de l’Instruction Publique] quoted in Patricia Tilburg, ‘Wholesome Imaginations. Pedagogy in the Early Third Republic’, Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 29, no. 3 (2003): 281. 46 J. Dorget, ‘Le musée scolaire et les leçons des choses’, in Revue Pédagogique, 89 vols., vol. 7 (Paris: Librairie Ch. Delagrave, 1885), 243. 47 As Richard Thompson identifies, ‘education meant more than schooling. It meant the subtle and constant indoctrination of all citizens with republican values.’ Thomson, Art of the Actual, 19. See also Célestin and DalMolin, France from 1851 to the Present, 89–91. 48 Elne, ‘Les Timbres-Poste’ (1890), 286. 49 See Steven M. Gelber, ‘Free Market Metaphor: The Historical Dynamics of Stamp Collecting’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 4 (1992): 754. 50 See for example Album de l’amateur de timbres-postes (Paris: L.-N. Tripon, 1869); Album de l’amateur de timbres-postes; Justin-H. Lallier, Album timbres-poste élémentaire, de 1840 à 1874 (Paris: A. Lenègre, 1873). 51 Elne, ‘Les Timbres-Poste’ (1890), 287; Louis Clodion, ‘La bourse aux timbres-poste’, L’Illustration, 20 December 1873, 415. 52 Jan Goldstein, ‘Foucault and the Post-Revolutionary Self: The Uses of Cousinian Pedagogy in Nineteenth-Century France’, in Foucault and the Writing of History, ed. Jan Goldstein (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), 102; Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception. Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 20. 53 Robert Elliot Kaplan, ‘France 1893-1898: The Fear of Revolution Among the Bourgeoisie’ (Doctoral Thesis, Cornell University, 1971), 18. 54 Jens Ivo Engels, ‘« La République est vivifiée par la vertu de ses hommes politiques »’, in Une contre-histoire de la IIIe République, ed. Marion Fontaine, Frédéric Monier and Christophe Prochasson (Paris: La Découverte, 2013), 41; Claude Dufresne, Les affaires de la IIIe République 1871-1940 (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 2008). 55 Mayeur and Rebérioux, Third Republic, 6; Kaplan, ‘France’. 56 As Noronha-DiVanna has rightly identified, ‘history had a role in promoting unity and patriotism and in establishing the Third Republic by demonstrating a series of continuities between the new (republican) France and the France of the past.’ Isabel

 Notes 199 Noronha-DiVanna, Writing History in the Third Republic (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), xviii–xix. She highlights the heterogeneity of a scholarly field that included, for example, both Hippolyte Taine and Ernest Renan under the loose banner of the école méthodique. The historical and historiographical discourses of the Third Republic, unified in their response to the positivist epistemology of the age, and the political imperatives of the regime, produced knowledge about the past that naturalized the bourgeois nation state and aimed to foster a sense of patriotic attachment to it in its readers. The historian’s role was to rigorously and objectively utilize their scientific method to weed out falsity, narrativize the past and in so doing produce History, with a capital ‘H’. On links to education see Katherine Auspitz, The Radical Bourgeoisie: The Ligue de l’Enseignement and the Origins of the Third Republic 1866-1885 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Robert Gildea, Education in Provincial France 1800-1914. A Study of Three Departments (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1983). 57 Boime, Commune, 77–112. 58 Galassi, ‘Caillebotte’s Method’, 27–40. 59 Ibid., 30–4. 60 Caillebotte would return to this idea of the split gaze in his Portrait de Jean Daurelle (Figure 2.5) of 1887, where the subject’s amblyopia indexes the split within the subject and the unbridgeable chasm between self and other. 61 Krauss, ‘Grids’, 15. Krauss cites, for example, Charles Blanc, Grammaire des arts du dessin, architecture, sculpture, peinture: jardins, gravure en pierres fines, gravure en médailles (Paris: J. Renouard, 1867); Ogden N. Rood, Modern Chromatics with Applications to Art and Industry (London: C. K. Paul, 1879). 62 Conserved at the Musée Carnavalet. 63 Galassi, ‘Caillebotte’s Method’, 36. 64 ‘La pluie ne se fait voir nulle part …’ (The rain is nowhere to be seen.) Ballu, ‘L’Exposition des peintres impresionnistes’, 147–8. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 125–7. ‘Sa Rue de Paris en temps de pluie est la masterpiece de l’exposition. Il y a oublié la pluie …. Il semble que les passants qu’il nous montre marchent sur un toit. Il a compté les pavés un à un et les a peints avec une conscience qui crève les yeux ; mais ce défaut me plaît presque, en un lieu où l’on professe qu’un tableau ne doit être qu’une réunion de taches.’ (His Paris Street in the rain is the masterpiece of the exhibition. He forgot the rain … . It seems that the passers-by that he shows us walk [gingerly as if] on a roof. He has counted the paving stones one by one and painted them with a conscientiousness that hurts the eyes; but this defect almost pleases me, in a place where they claim a painting should be nothing more than a collection of brushstrokes.) Bernadille [Victor Fournel], ‘L’Exposition des impressionnistes’, 2. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 129–31. Gaston Vassy similarly seemed to think that Caillebotte has simply forgotten the rain: ‘L’autre toile, c’est le carrefour formé par les rues de Turin et de Moscou, vu par un jour de pluie. Encore très bien dessiné … seulement, M. Caillebotte a oublié de représenter la pluie. Il paraît que ce jour-là elle ne lui avait pas laissé d’impression du tout’. (The other canvas is the crossroads formed by the rue de Turin and the rue de Moscou, seen on a rainy day. Very well drawn … but M. Caillebotte forgot to represent the rain. It seems that that day the rain hadn’t left any impression on him at all.) L’Evénement [Gaston Vassy], ‘L’Exposition des impressionnistes’, 2. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 144–5. Thomas Grimm

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identified not rain but snow: ‘Mon impression, à moi, c’est qu’il neige. Les parapluies ouverts ont des reflets blancs.’ (My impression is that it’s snowing. The open umbrellas have white reflections.). Thomas Grimm, ‘Les Impressionnistes’, Le Petit Journal, 7 April 1877, 1. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 151–3. 65 Sherman, ‘The Bourgeoisie’, 141–2. The Grand Larousse Dictionary speaks of the classing dimension of the umbrella thusly: ‘Le parapluie est le symbole de la vie tranquille et paisible. C’est l’instrument d’homme rangé, soigneux, du bourgeois, de M. Prudhomme. Quand on veut représenter le type du calme, de la médiocrité et de la bonhomie, il suffit de peindre un homme portant sous son bras un parapluie bien solide, bien solennel, un riflard bien conditionné’. (The umbrella is the symbol of the quiet and peaceful life. It is the implement of the steady and careful man, of the bourgeois, of M. Prudhomme. When one wants to depict the stereotype of calm, of mediocrity, and of good-naturedness, it suffices to paint a man carrying under his arm a very solid, very solemn umbrella, a slim brolly in good condition.) Pierre Larousse, ‘Parapluie’, in Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, 17 vols., vol. 12 (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1874), 198. 66 Ghez, ‘Caillebotte’s Pont de l’Europe’, 93. 67 Gabriel P. Weisberg, ‘The Urban Mirror: Contrasts in the Vision of Existence in the Modern City’, in Paris and the Countryside: Modern Life in Late-19th-Century-France, cat. Carrie Haslett, Gabriel P. Weisberg and Jennifer L. Shaw (Portland, Maine: Portland Museum of Art, 2006), 46–7. 68 Offenstadt, Castais and Suarisse, Béraud, 9; Sagner, ‘Caillebotte and Photography’, 20–1. Caillebotte kept a sketchbook between 1883 and 1886, currently held at the Art Institute of Chicago (Margaret Day Blake Fund, 2011.85). It is the only surviving sketchbook yet discovered. See Christopher Lloyd, ‘An Unknown Sketchbook by Gustave Caillebotte’, Master Drawings 26, no. 2 (1988): 107–118, 145–69; Nancy Ireson, ‘Cat. 4 Sketchbook, June 1883–September 1887: Curatorial Entry’, in Caillebotte Paintings and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago, ed. Gloria Groom and Genevieve Westerby (The Art Institute of Chicago, 2015), paragraphs 1–12. For more on Caillebotte’s methodical preparations for Rue de Paris see Kelly Keegan, ‘Cat. 1: Study for “Paris Street; Rainy Day”, 1877: Curatorial Entry’, ibid., paragraphs 1–11. 69 ‘With few exceptions, Caillebotte conceived these drawings independently of the architectural setting and probably made them before the painted study in the Musée Marmottan Monet.’ Gloria Groom and Kelly Keegan, ‘Cat. 2 Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877: Curatorial Entry’, ibid., paragraph 24. 70 Boime, Commune, 93. 71 Clark, Modern Life, 24, 36. 72 On censorship in the Second Empire and Third Republic see Karen L. Carter, ‘The Specter of Working-Class Crowds: Political Censorship of Posters in the City of Paris, 1881-1893’, in Out of Sight: Political Censorship of the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France, ed. Robert Justin Goldstein, Yale French Studies, vol. 122 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 130–59; Judith Wechsler, ‘Daumier and Censorship, 1866-1872’, ibid., 53–78; English, ‘Anxiety and Censorship’, 104–29. 73 Weisberg, ‘The Urban Mirror’, 47. 74 Groom and Keegan, ‘Paris Street; Rainy Day’, paragraph 9. They make this point in the course of arguing that Caillebotte used a Camera Lucida to transcribe the

 Notes 201 complex space of Rue de Paris (a claim for which, like the claims that Caillebotte practised photography, and unlike his well-documented philatelic practice, no documentary evidence exists). However, even in their reading does Caillebotte intervene to distort and deform the spatial accuracy this apparatus offered. Ibid., paragraphs 1–21. 75 Varnedoe and Galassi, ‘Caillebotte’s Space’, 20. 76 Galassi, ‘Caillebotte’s Method’, 38–9. 77 Rodolphe Rapetti, ‘Paris Seen from a Window’, in Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist, cat. Anne Distel, et al. (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1995), 142; Mathieu, ‘Caillebotte et Paris’, 29. 78 Rapetti, ‘Paris Seen from a Window’, 144. 79 Fonsmark, ‘Midst’, 13. 80 Bergerat, ‘Les Impressionnistes’, 2917–18. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 127–9. 81 (a une côté satirique assez amusant. Ces ouvriers, qui bourrent consciencieusement une pipe en contemplant le travail à faire, ne manquent pas d’observation. M. Caillebotte est un travailleur, un chercheur hardi, sur lequel, je crois, on peut fonder des solides espérances.) Rivière, ‘Les Intransigeants’, 298–302. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 185–7.

Chapter 5 1 (M. Caillebotte a des Raboteurs de parquet et Un jeune homme à sa fenêtre, d’un relief étonnant. Seulement, c’est là de la peinture bien anti-artistique, une peinture propre, une glace, bourgeoise à force d’exactitude. Le décalque de la vérité, sans l’impression originale du peintre, est une pauvre chose.) Le Sémaphore de Marseille [Émile Zola], ‘Lettres de Paris: Autre correspondance’, 1. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 108–9. 2 Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 29. 3 (Une œuvre d’art est un coin de la création vu à travers un tempérament) Zola, Mes haines, 229. 4 Shiff, Cézanne, 29–32, 88, 189. 5 (extraordinaires de vérité, non pas de vérité banale, mais de cette grande et belle vérité de l’art qui simplifie et élargit) Le Sémaphore de Marseille [Émile Zola], ‘Lettres de Paris: Autre correspondance’. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 108–9. 6 Chaumelin, ‘L’Exposition des intransigeants’; Jules Claretie, ‘Le Mouvement parisien: L’Exposition des intransigeants: M. Degas et ses amis’, L’Indépendance belge, 2 April 1876; Pierre Dax, ‘Chronique’, L’Artiste, 1 May 1876; Baron Schop, ‘La Semaine parisienne: L’Exposition des intransigeants – L’Ecole des Batignolles – L’Impressionnistes et plein air’, Le National, 7 April 1876. Reprinted (respectively) in Berson, Reviews, 1, 67–8, 69–70, 70–1, 106–7. 7 For cases for the former see E. F., ‘Le Groupe d’artistes de la rue Le Peletier’, Moniteur des arts, 21 April 1876; A. de L., ‘L’Exposition de la rue Le Peletier’, La Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, 1 April 1876; Emile Porcheron, ‘Promenades d’un flâneur: Les Impressionnistes’, Le Soleil, 4 April 1876; Ernest Chesneau, ‘Groupes sympathiques: Les Peintres impressionnistes’, Paris-Journal, 7 March 1882; F. Nélesque, ‘Chronique:

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Les Expositions artistiques’, L’Europe artiste, 19 March 1882; Un Passant, ‘Les On-Dit’, Le Rappel, 5 March 1882. Reprinted (respectively) in Berson, Reviews, 1, 83–4, 86–7, 102–3, 384–6, 405, 408. For cases of the latter see Enault, ‘L’Exposition des intransigeants’; G. d’Olby, ‘Salon de 1876: Avant l’ouverture – Exposition des intransigeants chez M. Durand-Ruel, rue Le Peletier, 11’, Le Pays, 10 April 1876; Alex Pothey, ‘Chronique’, Le Presse, 31 March 1876; Fichtre [pseud. Gaston Vassy], ‘L’Exposition des peintres indépendants’; Charles Flor, ‘Deux Expositions’, Le National, 3 March 1882; La Fare, ‘Exposition des impressionnistes’, Le Gaulois, 2 March 1882. Reprinted (respectively) in Berson, Reviews, 1, 81–3, 99–101, 103–4, 387, 387–9, 400–1. 8 Agulhon, The French Republic, 27. 9 Ibid., 27–9. It must be noted that the efficacy of the Napoleonic representative strategy was, at best, mixed. According to David I. Kulstein, Second Empire propaganda resolutely failed to attract the working class. David I. Kulstein, Napoleon III and the Working Class: A Study of Government Propaganda under the Second Empire (Sacramento: California State Colleges, 1969), 197–201. He identifies the failure of the regime to institute an effective and efficient propaganda system targeted directly at the working class (such as the fact that there was no pro-government newspaper published for workers), blaming the latent mistrust of the working class which had existed among the political elite since the 1848 Revolution. Other scholars have likewise identified elite fear of the ‘dangerous’ classes as a factor determining the state’s relationship with, and conceptualization of, the working class. Hobsbawm, Age of Capital, 248; Theodore Zeldin, A History of French Passions, 2 vols., vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 198; Magraw, French Working Class, 1, 11. Although the opinion of the urban working class towards the Second Empire and Napoléon III was by no means homogenous or stable, it was typically highly ambivalent. Alain Plessis, The Rise and Fall of the Second Empire, 1852-1871, trans. Jonathan Mandelbaum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 134, 161. Robert Gildea argues that while support was not uniform, workers tended to view the Second Empire more positively than they had the Second Republic. Robert Gildea, Children of the Revolution: The French 1799-1914 (London: Penguin, 2009), 100–1. Roger Magraw argues that Bonapartist authoritarianism had a profound and long-term impact on the labour movement by confirming, in the minds of militants, the perception of the state as a weapon of capitalist repression. Magraw, French Working Class, 1, 191. Gerald Friedman has emphasized the importance of state policy in the self-realization of the working class. Friedman, ‘The State’, 404. Likewise, Alain Cotterau argues that the experience of the 1848 Revolution and the Second Republic, which revealed the possibility of reactionary democracy and the isolation of workers in the national community, created a lasting rift between the labour movement and the state. Alain Cottereau, ‘The Distinctivenesss of WorkingClass Cultures in France, 1848-1900’, in Working-Class Formation: NineteenthCentury Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, ed. Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 147, 152. 10 Agulhon, The French Republic, 29. 11 Nicholas Green, ‘“All the Flowers in the Field”: The State, Liberalism and Art in France under the early Third Republic’, The Oxford Art Journal 10, no. 1 (1987): 71. 12 Neil McWilliam, Catherine Méneux and Jules Ramos, ‘L’art social de la Révolution à la Grande Guerre: ésquisse d’un parcours’, in L’Art Social en France de la Révolution à la Grande Guerre, ed. Neil McWilliam, Catherine Méneux and Jules Ramos (Paris

 Notes 203 and Rennes: Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art and Presses Universitaries de Rennes, 2014), 25–6; Thomson, Art of the Actual, 34, 105. 13 Miriam R. Levin, Republican Art and Ideology in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International Research Press, 1986), xv. 14 (réalisme démocratique) Pierre Vaisse, La Troisième République et les Peintres (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), 153–60. Quote from ibid., 62. 15 Charle, France in the Nineteenth Century, 116. As Jules Ferry wrote in 1890: ‘Our victory is rural, not urban, the towns are rotten and remain so; it is the republican of the countryside who votes for us en masse.’ Letter from Jules Ferry to Albert Ferry, 7 July 1890. Jules Ferry, Lettres de Jules Ferry, 1846-1893 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1914), 523–4. Translation from T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 120. 16 Weisberg, ‘Réalité et illusion’, 29. 17 Shaw, ‘Landscape Painting’, 63. See also Bann, Distinguished Images, 12. 18 Albert Boime, Art in an Age of Civil Struggle, 1848-1871 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 134. On the subsequent rehabilitation of Courbet see Linda Nochlin, ‘The De-Politicization of Gustave Courbet: Transformation and Rehabilitation under the Third Republic’, October 22 (1982): 64–78. 19 Willsdon, ‘“Promenades et plantations”’, 107–24. 20 Clark, Farewell to an Idea, 120. 21 (Au mur des mairies, on découvre, traduites en allégories ou en « symboles réalistes » dans de grandes compositions déoratives, les plus importantes convictions idéologiques de la IIIe République.) Thérèse Burollet, ‘Prolégomènes à l’étude du mur républicain’, in Le Triomphe des mairies: Grands décors républicains à Paris 1870-1914, cat. Thérèse Burollet, Daniel Imbert and Frank Folliot (Paris: Musée du Petit Palais, 1986), 36. 22 Weisberg, ‘Réalité et illusion’, 28. 23 The coherency of this broad decorative schema emerged, in many ways, despite, rather than as a result of, any monolithic or hegemonic centralized state apparatus. Daniel Imbert’s account of the institutional genesis of the Hôtel de Ville project emphasizes the disputational character of the administration, and the strategic political positioning that occurred between the different layers of national and municipal bureaucracies. Daniel Imbert, ‘L’Hôtel de Ville de Paris: genèse républicaine d’un grand décor’, in Le Triomphe des mairies: Grands décors républicains à Paris 1870-1914, cat. Thérèse Burollet, Daniel Imbert and Frank Folliot (Paris: Musée du Petit Palais, 1986), 62–71. For more on the Third Republic’s mural campaign, see Marie Jeannine Aquilino, ‘Painted Promises: The Politics of Public Art in Late Nineteenth-Century France’, The Art Bulletin 75, no. 4 (1993): 697–712. 24 Weisberg, ‘Réalité et illusion’, 28. 25 Indeed, as Miriam Levin notes, when Republicans spoke of social harmony, and harmony in art, they identified essentially the same quality. Levin, Art and Ideology, 10. For more on pastoral, allegorical and rural painting and the politics of time see, Margaret Werth, The Joy of Life: The Idyllic in French Art, circa 1900 (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2002); Jennifer L. Shaw, Dream States: Puvis de Chavannes, Modernism, and the Fantasy of France (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002). 26 Thomson, Art of the Actual, 10. 27 Weisberg, ‘Réalité et illusion’, 28; Geneviève Lacambre, ‘La république des paysans vue par les peintres’, in Des plaines à l’usine: images du travail dans la peinture française de 1870 à 1914 (Paris: Somology éditions d’art, 2001), 44.

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28 Young, Realism, 30. 29 Ibid., 32. 30 Ibid., 45–7. 31 Ibid., 42. 32 Ibid., 31. 33 Rancière, Proletarian Nights, 10. 34 Nicolas Pierrot, ‘« À l’époque où l’ouvrier sévissait dans l’art … » La représentation du travail industriel en France dans la peinture de chevalet 1860-1914’, in Des plaines à l’usine: images du travail dans la peinture française de 1870 à 1914 (Paris: Somology éditions d’art, 2001), 95. 35 McWilliam, Méneux and Ramos, ‘L’art social’, 26. 36 Nicolas Roussellier, ‘Electoral Antipluralism and Electoral Pluralism in France, from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to 1914’, in Pluralism and the Idea of the Republic in France, ed. Julian Wright and H. S. Jones (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 144. 37 Ibid. Emphasis his. 38 Varnedoe, Caillebotte, 9; Charles, Caillebotte, 69–72; Jean Bernac, ‘The Caillebotte Bequest to the Luxembourg’, in Gustave Caillebotte 1848-1894. A Loan Exhibition in Aid of The Hertford British Hospital in Paris (London: Wildenstein, 1966 [1895]), 33–4. 39 Mayeur and Rebérioux, Third Republic, 147. 40 Weisberg, ‘Réalité et illusion’, 28. On the centrality of social collectivity for the Third Republican state see Thomson, Art of the Actual, 16; Célestin and DalMolin, France from 1851 to the Present, 89. Kaplan, ‘France’, 18; Lehning, To Be a Citizen; Pasler, Composing the Citizen; Surkis, Sexing the Citizen; Charle, France in the Nineteenth Century, 140; Célestin and DalMolin, France from 1851 to the Present, 89; NoronhaDiVanna, Writing History, xviii–xix; Mayeur and Rebérioux, Third Republic, 15; Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 18701914 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1977); Auspitz, The Radical Bourgeoisie; Gildea, Education. 41 Weisberg, ‘The Urban Mirror’, 4; Sutcliffe, ‘Haussmann’s Paris’, 198; Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 161; Jacques Foucart, ‘De l’image du travail à l’oeuvre d’art’, in Des plaines à l’usine: images du travail dans la peinture française de 1870 à 1914 (Paris: Somology éditions d’art, 2001), 11–14. 42 John Rewald’s account of Impressionism is primarily associated with the former view. Rewald, Impressionism. See also Philip Nord, Impressionists and Politics: Art and Democracy in the Nineteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). 43 Clark, Modern Life, 260. 44 Weber, Peasants. 45 An undertone in this bridge iconography is the destruction of bridges during the Franco-Prussian War and Siege of Paris. The newspaper L’Illustration’s coverage of the conflicts was punctuated by images of bridges in ruin. This connection is briefly drawn with regards to Caillebotte by Mary Morton et al., ‘Suburban Views’, in Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye, cat. Mary Morton and George T. M. Shackelford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 208. Thus, these icons of modern engineering and of the invariable march of progress were overlaid by an iconographic awareness of their national strategic importance. 46 Clark, Modern Life, 190–1.

 Notes 205 47 White, Work and Leisure, 1. The very first point White makes is that the establishment of work and leisure as binary categories was the result of a profound restructuring of labour and time under the prerogatives of capitalism in the late nineteenth century. 48 Clark, Modern Life, 191. 49 Marnin Young, ‘Heroic Indolence: Realism and the Politics of Time in Raffaëlli’s Absinthe Drinkers’, The Art Bulletin 90, no. 2 (2008): 235–59. 50 Ibid., 241. 51 This was, of course, also partly a question of method: Zola was proud of the fact that his novels emerged from the experimental and scientific analysis of his obsessively detailed and rigorous observations. There was no artificial distance in Zola’s understanding of his own work, no pane of glass separating the researcher from the object of his study. 52 Émile Zola, ‘Mon Salon’, L’Evénement, 7 May 1866; Robert Lethbridge, ‘Zola and Contemporary Painting’, in The Cambridge Companion to Emile Zola, ed. Brian Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 69. 53 Henri Mitterand, Émile Zola: Fiction and Modernity, trans. Monica Lebron and David Baguley (London: The Emile Zola Society, 2000), 142. 54 Lethbridge, ‘Zola and Contemporary Painting’, 71. 55 Marie Berhaut noted this chronological conjunction in 1951. Caillebotte (1848-1894), Berhaut, unpaginated. 56 Émile Zola, L’Assommoir, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, [1877] 2009), 3. (J’ai voulu peindre la déchéance fatale d’une famille ouvrière, dans le milieu empesté de nos faubourgs.) Émile Zola, L’Assommoir, 3rd ed. (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1877), i. 57 Zola, L’Assommoir, 3. (ivrognerie et de la fainéantise) Zola, L’Assommoir, i. Zola insists on poverty as a disease, comparable to cholera, or a natural fact, as the wind. Zola, L’Assommoir, 420, 398. 58 L’Assommoir, 3. (C’est de la morale en action, simplement) Zola, L’Assommoir, ii. 59 Brian Nelson, ‘Zola and the Nineteenth Century’, in The Cambridge Companion to Emile Zola, ed. Brian Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 9. 60 Sandy Petrey, ‘Nature, Society, and the Discourse of Class’, in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1994), 774; Nelson, ‘Zola and the Nineteenth Century’, 9. 61 Zola, L’Assommoir, 3. (Mon crime est d’avoir eu la curiosité littéraire de ramasser et de couler dans un moule très-travaillé la langue du peuple. Ah ! la forme, là est le grand crime !) Zola, L’Assommoir, ii. 62 Zola, L’Assommoir, 3. (le premier roman sur le peuple, qui ne mente pas et qui ait l’odeur du peuple) Zola, L’Assommoir, ii. 63 Mitterand, Zola, 5. 64 Petrey, ‘Nature, Society, and the Discourse of Class’, 775. 65 Anson Rabinbach, ‘The European Science of Work: The Economy of the Body at the End of the Nineteenth Century’, in Work in France: Representations, Meanings, Organization, and Practice, ed. Steven Laurence Kaplan and Cynthia J. Koepp (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986), 481. 66 Ibid. 67 (‘Après … l’Assommoir, voici les Impressionnistes. Après le roman, la peinture). Bariolette, ‘Notes parisiennes’, Le Sportsman, 7 April 1877, 2. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 126.

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Chapter 6 1 Zola, L’Assommoir, 372. 2 Caillebotte was among the Impressionists exhibiting in 1877, although not mentioned by Bariolette in name, perhaps a saving grace in what amounted to a savaging of the ‘école des Faux-Arts’. Bariolette, ‘Notes parisiennes’, 2. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 127. (curiosités malsaines) Bariolette, ‘Notes parisiennes’, 2. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 126. 3 (Je n’ai pas seulement soutenu les Impressionnistes. Je les ai traduits en littérature, par les touches, notes, colorations, par la palette de beaucoup de mes descriptions. Dans tous mes livres … avec les peintres … Les peintres m’ont aidé à peindre d’une manière neuve, ‘littérairement’.) Émile Zola cited by Henri Hertz, ‘Émile Zola, témoin de la vérité’, Europe 30 (1952): 83–4. Translation from Lethbridge, ‘Zola and Contemporary Painting’, 67. 4 William J. Berg, The Visual Novel: Emile Zola and the Art of His Times (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 17. 5 Susan Harrow, Zola, The Body Modern: Pressures and Prospects of Representation (Oxford: Legenda, 2010). 6 Ibid., 14. 7 Hannah Thompson, Taboo: Corporeal Secrets in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Legenda, 2013). 8 White, Work and Leisure. 9 Ibid., 58, 64. 10 Ibid., 47, 67–9. 11 ‘She became even more slovenly; she stayed away from the laundry more often, spending entire days jabbering, and went limp as a rag when there was work to be done. … She became a proper lazy-bones.’ Zola, L’Assommoir, 340, see also 11, 173, 194, 311, 369–70, 334, 382, 439. 12 Ibid., 121, 233, 114–15. Then, Gervaise realized that he fancied he was on a roof, putting down sheets of zinc. He’d do the bellows with his mouth, he’d move the soldering irons about in the brazier, and then kneel down to run his thumb round the edges of the mat as if he thought he was soldering it. Yes, his trade was coming back to him when he was just about to croak. Ibid., 433–4. 13 Gone were the days when the rotgut put colour in his cheeks. No longer could he slap himself on the belly and boast that the bleeding firewater made him fat, for the ugly yellow fat of his past years had melted away and he was growing skinny, his complexion turning a leaden grey tinged with green, like that of a stiff in a rotting pond. Ibid., 334. ‘The final break-up of this decaying barrel as its hoops snapped apart one after the other’. Ibid., 386. 14 Ibid., 42, 95, 12, 40, 40–1, 108, 233, 109. ‘Their eyes glazed over with greed as they talked about it [the goose].’ Ibid., 195. ‘Gervaise looked enormous as she sat slumped forward on her elbows, eating great chunks of breast and never saying a word for

 Notes 207 fear of missing a mouthful … as greedy as a cat.’ Ibid., 214. ‘You could see their bellies swell up while they ate.’ Ibid., 215. ‘Needless to say, you can’t go on sprees and work as well. So, after Lantier joined the household, Coupeau, who already hardly raised a finger, got that he didn’t so much as touch his tools.’ Ibid., 257. ‘She behaved as if drunk with the frenzy of running into debt, madly choosing the most expensive things and surrendering to her greed now that she no longer paid for anything.’ Ibid., 248. See also ibid., 270–1, 394. 15 Ibid., 271. 16 Ibid., 348, 368. At fifteen she’d grown like a young calf and was very fair-skinned and wellrounded, in fact as plump as a pin cushion. … A pretty, trollopy little face, with a creamy complexion, skin velvety as a peach, a funny nose, a rosy kisser and eyes so bright that men longed to light their pipes at them. Her mass of blond hair, the colour of ripe oats, seemed to have dusted her temples with golden freckles that lay across her brow like a bank of sunshine. Oh, she was a hot number. … She’d got her own tits now, a brand new pair, white and satiny. Ibid., 348–9. See also 350, 352, 360, 367, 385, 381–2. 17 Ibid., 400–1. Tiny eight-year-old Lalie, who was no bigger than two sous’ worth of butter, kept house as neatly as a grown-up; and it wasn’t an easy task, for she had charge of two little mites, her brother Jules and her sister Henriette, tots of three and five, whom she had to keep an eye on all day long while she swept the floors and washed the dishes. … Listening to her talk you’d have thought she was thirty. She knew all about shopping, mending, and looking after her home, and she spoke of the children as if she’d already borne two or three herself. Ibid., 328–9. See also ibid. 192, 253. Even on her deathbed, Lalie is concerned more with the cleanliness of the home and the well-being of her siblings. Ibid., 399. 18 One moment ‘singing the praises of work, saying that work ennobles man’, the next encouraging his companions to ‘binge’ with him instead of working, out of ‘politeness’. Ibid., 257, 261. In the meantime he [Lantier] did absolutely nothing, but strolled about in the sun with his hands in his pockets like the idle rich. Sometimes, when he complained, they’d [the Coupeaus] venture to mention a factory that needed workers, and then he’d smile in a pitying fashion and declare he had no intention of starving to death while slogging away for other people. Ibid., 235. ‘The morning Étienne set off Lantier made him a speech about his rights, then, embracing him, declared “Always remember that the worker who produces is not a slave, but that whoever produced nothing is a parasite”.’ Ibid., 245. ‘Lantier stood up for the bosses; sometimes they had to put up with ever such a lot. … Workmen were a bunch of bastards. … Then suddenly, Lantier started attacking the bosses as well. … A foul breed they were, exploiting people shamelessly, living off human flesh.’ Ibid., 258. ‘His features, despite an overall puffiness due to his slothful life, were as handsome as ever … he appeared exactly the age he was, thirty-five.’ Ibid., 234. After leeching a living out of both Gervaise and Virginie, the ‘artful hatter’ effortlessly attaches himself to a tripe-seller. Ibid., 438.

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19 Ibid., 157, 158. 20 Ibid., 8, 186. 21 Ibid., 57, 139, 145, 172. 22 Ibid., 16–17. 23 Ibid., 164–5. 24 ‘With her leather and metal holder Clémence took an iron from the stove and put it up to her cheek to feel if it was hot enough. She rubbed it on her “square”, wiped it on a cloth hanging from her belt, then set to work on her thirty-fifth shirt, beginning with the shirt-front and the two sleeves.’ Ibid., 145. 25 ‘There were eight of them, and each had her own pot of glue, pincers, tools and embossing cushion in front of her. The table was littered with a jumble of pieces of wire, cotton reels, cotton wool, green and brown paper, and leaves and petals cut out of silk, satin or velvet.’ Ibid., 356. 26 Not once in his lengthy description of Lorilleux at work does Zola stray from this formula: [Lorilleux] was winding the wire prepared by his wife round a mandrel, a very thin steel rod. Next, with a saw, he delicately cut along the length of the mandrel so each turn of the wire made a link. Then he soldered them. The links were placed on a big piece of charcoal. He dampened them with a drop of borax from the bottom of a broken glass beside him before quickly heating them with the horizontal flame of the blow-pipe till they glowed red. Having done this to a hundred or so links, he went back again to his fine work, leaning on the edge of a small board which had been polished smooth by his hands. With his pliers he twisted each link, gripping one side as he poked it into the link above which was already in place, then reopened it with an awl, doing this with such regularity and so fast, links being added to links, that under Gervaise’s very eyes the chain was gradually growing longer and longer without her being able to see or understand exactly how it was done. … The husband [Lorilleux], huddled over in the green light cast by the globe of water, was starting another piece of chain, bending the links with his pliers, gripping it on one side, poking it into the link above and reopening it with the awl, on and on like an automaton, never waiting a moment even to wipe the sweat from his face. Ibid., 57–62. It is only at the end, almost as an afterthought, that Zola lets slip that Lorilleux is a man who sweats, rather than the automaton his activity implies him to be. Compare this language to that Zola uses to describe the action of the machines in Goujet’s recently mechanized forge: ‘The stoker took the piece of iron from the furnace; the hammer-man placed it in the heading frame which a stream of water kept permanently wet so the steel would remain tempered; and that was that, the screw came down and the bolt fell out with its head as round as if it had been cast in a mould.’ Ibid., 172. 27 For an account of Zola’s evocation of alienating work by reference to machinery elsewhere in his oeuvre see White, Work and Leisure, 57–8. 28 Zola, L’Assommoir, 168–9. 29 Ibid., 24–32. 30 Ibid., 29. 31 Ibid., 28–9.

 Notes 209 32 Kathryn Brown, in her survey of the trope of the liseuse in nineteenth-century painting, argues that one of the reasons the theme held such sway was that it enabled a ‘fantasy of a female reader whose imaginative life remained untouched by immoral literature just as her body was isolated from processes of social and industrial modernization’. Kathryn Brown, Women Readers in French Painting 1870-1890: A Space for Imagination (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 2. The preservation of this male fantasy of a multifarious feminine purity required the strict policing of women’s reading material by their male family members: history books were offered as healthy alternatives by ‘those keen to circumscribe women’s literary adventures’. Ibid., 7. The constant fear that inappropriate reading matter might enflame feminine sexuality, anxieties that ‘secret reading [might act] as a trigger for female masturbation’, inculcated a culture wherein, even though, as Martyn Lyons reminds us, ‘Women formed a large and increasing part of the new novel-reading public’ in the nineteenth century, they were often kept away from novels, such as Zola’s, containing easily shocking visions of the abnormal or abject, what Hannah Thompson describes as the potentially dangerous, yet ‘compelling … spectacle of the disintegrating body’. Ibid., 165; Martyn Lyons, ‘New Readers in the Nineteenth Century’, in A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Amherst: University of Massachussetts Press, 1999), 315; Thompson, Taboo, 1–2. 33 Lacan, Seminar XI, 235. 34 Zola, L’Assommoir, 29. 35 Ibid., 30–1. 36 Ibid., 30. 37 Ibid., 31. 38 ‘She [Gervaise] was crouching on the floor beside a bowl, busy starching some linen. In her white underskirt, with her sleeves rolled up and her bodice slipping off her shoulders, her arms and neck bare, she looked all rosy, and was sweating so much that the little curls of her tousled blond hair stuck to her skin.’ Ibid., 137–8. Likewise, we witness ‘[Clémence raising] her arms, so that her lovely big breasts thrust against her chemise and her shoulders seemed about to burst through her short sleeves’. Ibid., 138. 39 Ibid., 190. 40 Harrow, The Body Modern, 214–15, 212. 41 As we have seen vis-à-vis Raffaëlli, within the logic of this Republican ideology the wilful absence of labour, the condition of idleness, precludes on from occupying a position within the class structure, hence being déclassé. 42 Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London and New York: Verso, 2013), 11. The book, interestingly, features Les raboteurs de parquet on the cover while referring neither to it nor to Caillebotte in the text itself. 43 Ibid., 18, 26, 11. 44 He refers to his application of the term affect a ‘crude misuse of the term’, one that is nevertheless highly productive. Ibid., 10. 45 Ibid., 65. 46 Quotations from ibid., 42, 39. See also ibid., 35. 47 Ibid., 45–77. 48 Ibid., 63.

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49 Ibid., 75. 50 Ibid., 76. 51 Ibid. 52 Quotation from ibid., 5. See also ibid., 195–231. 53 Ibid., 146–50. 54 Ibid., 76. 55 W. Scott Haine, The World of the Paris Café: Sociability among the French Working Class 1789-1914 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 55–87. 56 Marrinan, ‘Caillebotte as Professional Painter’, 24–6; Young, Realism, 58–89. 57 Garb, ‘Caillebotte’s Male Figures’, 30–3. 58 Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1998). 59 Fried, ‘Caillebotte’s Impressionism’, 82. 60 Ibid., 107. 61 Gustave Caillebotte, Les raboteurs de parquet, 1876. Oil on Canvas. Private Collection. 62 ‘[Lorilleux], huddled over in the green light cast by the globe of water.’ Zola, L’Assommoir, 57–62. ‘The bright glare lit him up mercilessly, without a shadow.’ Ibid., 164. 63 Ibid., 168–9. 64 Ibid., 372. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Frederic Jameson outlines a very different understanding of the function of light in Zola’s novelistic practice. For him, it reveals the colonization of narrative by affect in so far as it introduces an affective logic of redoubling, mirroring, differentiation and intensity. See Jameson, Antinomies, 67–9. 68 Young, Realism, 58–89; Marrinan, ‘Caillebotte as Professional Painter’, 24–6. 69 (Avec un dos, nous voulons que se révèle un tempérament, un âge, un état social; par une paire de mains, nous devons exprimer un magistrat ou un commerçant; par un geste, toute une suite de sentiments. … Des mains qu’on tient dans les poches pourront être éloquentes. … une atmosphère se crée ainsi dans chaque intérieur, de même qu’un air de famille entre tous les meubles et les objets qui le remplissent.) Duranty, La nouvelle peinture, 24–6. 70 Marrinan, ‘Caillebotte as Professional Painter’, 52–3. 71 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997). 72 Garb, ‘Caillebotte’s Male Figures’, 33. 73 Zola, L’Assommoir, 121. 74 Ibid., 258, 245, 121. 75 Morton et al., ‘Viewing Others’, 163. 76 Elizabeth Benjamin, ‘All the Discomforts of Home: Caillebotte and the NineteenthCentury Bourgeois Interior’, ibid., 87–8. 77 Ibid., 97. 78 Paul Pelliot, ‘Henri Cordier (1849-1925)’, T’oung Pao 24, no. 1 (1925–1926): 2. 79 A distance or remove mirrored in Cordier’s own work which, because his knowledge of the Chinese language was slight, consisted largely in editing and compiling the

 Notes 211 work of other Occidental scholars. E. Denison Ross, ‘M. Henri Cordier’, The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, no. 3 (1925): 157. 80 I discuss the relation between work and alienation in Caillebotte’s domestic interiors, drawing on Hannah Arendt’s critique of modernity, elsewhere. Samuel Raybone, ‘Gustave Caillebotte’s Interiors: Working between Leisure and Labor’, nonsite.org 25 (2018): unpaginated. https​://no​nsite​.org/​artic​le/gu​stave​-cail​lebot​tes-i​nteri​ors. 81 Garb, ‘Caillebotte’s Male Figures’, 42–6. 82 Zola, L’Assommoir, 158. 83 Ibid., 372. 84 Ibid., 412–13. 85 Ibid., 414. 86 ‘Suddenly, she noticed her shadow on the ground. When she came near a lamppost the blurry shadow would concentrate and sharpen, becoming a huge, squat mass, so round it looked grotesque. It would spread out, the belly, breasts and rump sliding and flowing into each other. She was limping so badly that the shadow did a somersault at every step: a real clown! Then when she moved away the clown would grow larger, gigantic, filling the boulevard, making bows that hit its nose against the trees and houses. Christ! How comic and how frightening she looked! She’d never so completely grasped how far she’d come down. So then she couldn’t stop herself watching it, waiting for each gas lamp and following the antics of her shadow. Oh, what a fine floozie she’d got walking beside her! What a sight! That must really draw the men!’ Ibid. 87 ‘And she lowered her voice, not daring to do more than mumble at the backs of passers-by./ “Excuse me, Sir …”.’ Ibid., 414, 413–17. 88 Ibid., 327–8, 345–6. 89 Fried, ‘Caillebotte’s Impressionism’, 96. 90 Zola, L’Assommoir, 16–17. 91 Groom, ‘Interiors and Portraits’, 187. 92 For Paula Young Lee, the still lifes that Caillebotte painted contemporaneously with his nudes, especially Veau à l’Étal (c. 1882–3), likewise reveal his grim captivation with the display of human flesh. For Lee, Caillebotte paints meat as if human, as if an object of desire; yet, he does so in such a way as to encode ‘anxious dialogues regarding the buying and selling of human labour’, and advance a critique of ‘the contemporary underbelly of capitalism as [being] monstrously soulless and hollow’. Paula Young Lee, ‘Stripped: Gustave Caillebotte and the Carcass of Modern Life’, in Visions of the Industrial Age, 1830-1914: Modernity and the Anxiety of Representation in Europe, ed. Minsoo Kang and Amy Woodson-Boulton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 271–94. Quotes from ibid., 278. 93 For Lacan the mirror stage represents both a developmental moment and a structure essential to subjectivity. In the former, ‘historical’ form, it describes the stage at which the uncoordinated infant sees its body reflected in a mirror; the contrast between felt-fragmentation and seen-wholeness arouses an aggressive reaction which is only overcome when the infant identifies with the image, assuming it as its own. The ego is a product of this identification. In its structural guise, it sets the scene for the subject’s narcissistic, libidinal and fascinated relationship with his own image. For the clearest introductory definition see Dylan Evans, ‘Mirror Stage’, in An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, by Dylan Evans (London: Routledge, 1996), 114–16.

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94 Broude, ‘Outing Impressionism’, 152–3. 95 Garb, ‘Caillebotte’s Male Figures’, 50–2. 96 Broude, ‘Outing Impressionism’, 152.

Chapter 7 1 (Je fais un Stanopea aurea qui est en fleurs depuis ce matin et comme la fleur ne dure que 3 ou 4 jours et ne revient que dans un an je ne peux la quitter. Excusez moi donc auprès Mirbeau.) Letter from Gustave Caillebotte to Claude Monet, 11 November 1890. Paris, Musée d’Orsay, ODO 2007-1-9. Quoted in Bocquillon, ‘Gustave, peintre et jardinier’, 32. Emphasis mine. 2 ‘Notice of Service, Convoi et Enterrement de Monsieur Gustave CAILLEIBOTTE’. Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, 1894, Recueil. Caillebotte, Gustave. Dossier documentaire réuni par la Bibliothèque Historique, 4 BIO 02753. 3 Quotations in order Camille Pissarro, Letters to His Son Lucien (New York: Pantheon, 1943), 235; Varnedoe, Caillebotte, 10. 4 On the structural links between familiarity and expressed preference see Cutting, ‘Caillebotte’, 319–43. On the scholarly trope of Caillebotte’s ‘slackened ambition’ and his transition from a Degas-inspired Realism to a looser Impressionism derivative of Monet see Varnedoe, Caillebotte, 8; Berhaut, Caillebotte, l’impressionniste, 34–6; Berhaut, ‘Introduction’, 16–18; Caillebotte: catalogue raisonné, 17–18, 33, 49–51; Darragon, Caillebotte, 127; Brettell, ‘Caillebotte and “The New Painting”’, 55–8; Fried, ‘Caillebotte’s Impressionism’, 67; Charles, ‘Caillebotte and Boating’, 110; Shackelford, ‘Middle’, 48–53. 5 (M. Gustave Caillebotte. – Des champs, des jardins, des canotiers: œuvres d’un impressionnisme fatigué et retardataire.) Félix Fénéon, ‘Quelques impressionnistes’, in Oeuvres plus que complètes, by Joan U. Halperin, vol. 1 (Geneva and Paris: Librairie Droz, [1888] 1970), 127. Eager to promote Neo-Impressionism, Fénéon of course had a stake in convincing his readers of the irrelevance of Impressionism. 6 (Depuis longtemps, Caillebotte avait délaissé la peinture pour se donner aux bateaux et au jardinage dont il raffolait.) Gustave Geffroy, ‘L’art aujourd’hui : Gustave Caillebotte’, Le Journal, 25 February 1894, 2. 7 Bocquillon, ‘Gustave, peintre et jardinier’, 32; Berhaut, ‘Introduction’, 12; Gustave Caillebotte and Photography, Sagner, Hollein, and Pohlmann, 228. 8 Bocquillon, ‘Gustave, peintre et jardinier’, 32. 9 The Unknown Impressionist, Distel, et al., 195. 10 Richard Kendall, ed. Monet by Himself. Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, Letters, trans. Bridget Strevens Romer (Boston, New York and London: Little, Brown and Company, 2000), 14. 11 Selected letters between Caillebotte and Monet are collected in the catalogues raisonnés of each artist. See especially letters 42, 43, 44 in Berhaut, Caillebotte: catalogue raisonné, 278–9. These correspond to those reproduced in Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet. Biographie et catalogue raisonné, 5 vols., vol. 3 (Paris and Lausanne: La Bibliothèque des Arts, 1979), 298. 12 Berhaut, Caillebotte: catalogue raisonné, 278, note 271.

 Notes 213 13 Ibid., 278 letters 236, 242, and 243. See also ‘Archives Claude Monet’, 22 letters numbers 33 and 35, 24 letters numbers 38 and 39. Monet’s concern with the quotidian care of his garden is confirmed by the detailed instructions left for his gardener in a letter tentatively dated to February 1900, outlining the steps he was to take in Monet’s planned absence the following month. Kendall, Monet, 187. A brief mention of his flowering irises in a letter to Caillebotte from spring 1891 and an invitation for a visit to Gustave Geffroy in June 1904 offer glimpses of Monet’s clear interest in the aesthetic possibilities of his garden. Respectively, Berhaut, Caillebotte: catalogue raisonné, 279; Kendall, Monet, 194. 14 Jean-Pierre Hoschedé, Claude Monet ce mal connu, 2 vols., vol. 1 (Geneva: Pierre Cailler, 1960), 57; Stephan Gwynn, Claude Monet and His Garden. The Story of an Artist’s Paradise (London: Country Life Limited, 1934), 43. Gwynn further notes the possibility that Caillebotte gifted Monet the flowers evident in the latter’s paintings of his garden. Ann Dumas likewise notes that Caillebotte was among the first visitors to Monet’s garden in Giverny. Ann Dumas, ‘Monet’s Garden at Giverny’, in Painting the Modern Garden. Monet to Matisse, cat. Ann Dumas and William H. Robinson (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2015), 54. 15 John House, ‘The Imaginative Space of the Impressionist Garden’, in The Painter’s Garden: Design, Inspiration, Delight, cat. Sabine Schulze (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2006), 71–97. See also Clare A. P. Willsdon, ‘Impressionist Gardens’, in Painting the Modern Garden. Monet to Matisse, cat. Ann Dumas and William H. Robinson (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2015), 80. 16 Marianne Delafond and Genet-Bondeville, Monet Le Prodige des Nymphéas (Paris: Musée Marmottan Monet, 2002), 66. 17 Letter from Claude Monet to the Prefect of the Eure, 17 July 1893. Kendall, Monet, 179–80. 18 John House, Monet. Nature into Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 217. 19 Claude Monet quoted in François Thiébault-Sisson, ‘Les Nymphéas de Claude Monet’, Revue d’art 1927, 44–5. Cited in House, Monet, 221. See also Gwynn, Monet and His Garden, 62. 20 Monet quoted in Marc Elder (pseud. Marcel Tendron), À Giverny, chez Claude Monet (Paris: Bernheim-Jeune, 1924), 13. Cited in House, Monet, 31. 21 Hoschedé, Monet, 1, 57. 22 His flair for radical innovation was likewise expressed in the domain of naval architecture, in which Caillebotte defied the consensus of his peers in designing Mouquette: a yacht eight times taller than wide. Charles, Caillebotte, 49. 23 Gilles Baumont, La propriété Caillebotte à Yerres … ‘un beau jardin bien planté’ (Yerres: Imprimerie Municipale, 1994), 40–5; Wittmer, Garden, 40. 24 Baumont, ‘un beau jardin bien planté’, 40–5. 25 Lobstein, ‘Yerres et Caillebotte’, 23–4. 26 Wittmer, Garden, 11. 27 Many of these early works were presented in the exhibition Caillebotte jardinier, cat. Bocquillon, Luengo, and Chardeau. See also Bocquillon, ‘Gustave, peintre et jardinier’, 22–5. 28 On the identification of the figures in these paintings see Caillebotte à Yerres, Lemoine, 58–61, 46–9.

214

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29 Gustave Caillebotte, Watering Trough, Municipal Laundry, and Boathouse at Yerres, before 1879. 18 × 30 cm, pencil on paper. Private Collection; Gustave Caillebotte, Interior of a Laundry Barge or Laundresses at Work, before 1879. 16 × 19 cm, pencil on paper. Private Collection. See Marrinan, Caillebotte, 360–1; Wittmer, Garden, 267. 30 Gustave Caillebotte, Périssoire on the Yerres River, 1878. 65.7 × 81 cm, oil on canvas. Norton Simon Collection, Pasadena, M.2010.1.238.P. 31 Marrinan, Caillebotte, 360–1. 32 Garb, ‘Caillebotte’s Male Figures’, 41–2. 33 Letter from Gustave Caillebotte to Claude Monet, 20 July 1887. ‘Archives Claude Monet’, 20, letter number 30. Letter from Gustave Caillebotte to Claude Monet, January–February 1894. Ibid., 24, letter number 39. Charles, Caillebotte, 67–73. 34 (comme un autel à l’industrie, un hangar de verre, une usine à fleurs) Charles, Caillebotte, 73. 35 The video reconstruction produced by Cyril Jousseaume for the 2016 Giverny and Madrid exhibition (and kindly shared with the author) is also exceedingly helpful. Cyril Jousseaume, Film d’animation 3D reconstituant la propriété de Gustave Caillebotte au Petit Gennevilliers en 1889 (2016). Film. 36 Many of Martial’s photographs appear in Dans l’intimité des frères, Lemoine, et al. 37 Gustave Caillebotte, Boathouse at Argenteuil, c. 1887. 50 × 60 cm, Oil on Canvas. Private Collection. 38 Gustave Caillebotte, Laundry Barges along the Seine; Laundry Drying, c. 1888–92. 54 × 73 cm, oil on canvas. Private Collection. 39 Fried, ‘Caillebotte’s Impressionism’, 35. 40 Ibid., 35–6. 41 Marrinan, Caillebotte, 363. 42 Ibid., 355–63. Three studies, all c. 1892, 54 × 64 cm, oil on canvas. Private Collection. 43 Callen, The Work of Art, 213–45. 44 Ibid., 224–45. Likewise, ‘the extraordinarily tactile paint matière and visible brittlebrush facture’ of Rue de Paris; temps de pluie, Le Pont de L’Europe, and Les Peintres en bâtiment ‘literally foreground the physical labour of painting’. Ibid., 154. 45 Ibid., 244–5. 46 Marrinan, Caillebotte, 356. 47 (une usine à fleurs). Charles, Caillebotte, 73. 48 Given his still life on the theme some years later, we can identify the middle-left plot to contain cabbages: Gustave Caillebotte, Les Choux, 1885. 54 × 65 cm, oil on canvas. Private Collection. 49 Pierre Wittmer, ‘Note on Caillebotte as an Horticulturalist’, in Gustave Caillebotte. The Unknown Impressionist, cat. Anne Distel, et al. (London: The Royal Academy of Arts, 1996), 204–5. In his 1839 De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs, Chevreul had devoted an entire section to the application of his chromatic theory to garden design. Michel Eugène Chevreul, De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs et de l’assortiment des objets colorés considérés d’après cette loi dans ses rapports avec la peinture, les tapisseries … (Paris: Pitois-Levrault, 1839), 463–563. See also William H. Robinson, ‘Painting the Modern Garden: An Introduction’, in Painting the Modern Garden. Monet to Matisse, cat. Ann Dumas and William H. Robinson (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2015), 19–20; Wittmer, Garden, 253–63.

 Notes 215 50 See Martial Caillebotte, Gustave Caillebotte dans sa serre aux orchidées du PetitGennevilliers, 1892, photograph. Private Collection. 51 Gwynn, Monet and His Garden, 63. 52 (Je fais un Stanopea aurea qui est en fleurs depuis ce matin et comme la fleur ne dure que 3 ou 4 jours et ne revient que dans un an je ne peux la quitter. Excusez moi donc auprès Mirbeau.) Letter from Gustave Caillebotte to Claude Monet, 11 November 1890. Paris, Musée d’Orsay, ODO 2007-1-9. Quoted in Bocquillon, ‘Gustave, peintre et jardinier’, 32. 53 Øystein Sjåstad, A Theory of the Tache in Nineteenth Century Painting (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 18. Emphasis his. 54 Bergerat, ‘Les Impressionnistes’, 2917–18. Reprinted in Berson, Reviews, 1, 127–9.

Conclusion 1 (Monsieur Caillebotte serait plutôt un romantique: sa manœuvre est plus hardie, sa voilure est, en général, une sorte de défi adressé au vent ; il laisse porter sur la risée avec une audace que le succès justifie souvent, hâtons nous de le dire. Le sympathique peintre impressionniste n’est pas un ‘oseur’ seulement en peinture. A ceux qui critiqueraient son jeu, il pourrait faire une repose péremptoire : c’est qu’il arrive le premier.) Le Yacht, 11 October 1879. 2 Stewart, On Longing, 159. 3 Clark, Modern Life, 24, 36.

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Index Alexis, Paul  29 American Philatelist, The  48 Ancien Régime  80 Archives nationales  41 L’avenir national  29 Bacon, Edward Denny  73 Ballu, Roger  67, 90 Ballu, Théodore  84 Balzac, Honoré de  45 Bariolette  119, 120 Barre, Jacques-Jean  80 Bastien-Lepage, Jules  69, 109 Les foins  110, 111 Saison d’octobre  109 Baudoüin, Paul: Famille et Travail  109 Baudrillard, Jean  46–7, 55 System of Objects  46 Baudry, Paul-Jacques-Aimé  84 Béliard, Édouard  29 Benjamin, Elizabeth  136 Benjamin, Walter  36 ‘Unpacking My Library. A Talk about Book Collecting’  46 Bennett, Tony  66 ‘Exhibitionary Complex, The’  62 Béraud, Jean  50, 67–8, 95, 98 Le boulevard Poissonière sous la pluie  69, 90 Le dimanche, près de Saint-Philippedu-Roule  68 Sur le boulevard  70–1 Berg, William J.  120 Bergerat, Émile  100, 164 Bergès, Ernest-Georges: Visite à l’usine après une soirée chez le directeur  111 Bergson, Russell  75 Berhaut, Marie  50, 54, 149 Berthier, Charlotte (mistress of Caillebotte)  52, 140 Le Bien Public  117

Bigot, Charles  61, 67 boats Chantier Luce  31 Iris  31 Roastbeef  10, 25–6, 33–6, 56 Bocquillon, Marina Ferretti  147, 148 Boime, Albert  1, 87, 96, 108 Bonnat, Léon  7, 27, 69 Brault, Maurice  54, 100 Broude, Norma  143 Cable, Patrick Shaw  36 Caillebotte, Alfred (half-brother)  147 Caillebotte, Céleste (mother) death  10, 17, 38, 39, 41, 43, 151, 166 Caillebotte, Gustave ‘acting out’ (1887)  54, 168 bereavement, impact of, on  10, 38, 39, 41, 43, 53, 166 collecting (see Impressionist painting collecting; stamp collecting) death  9, 147 education (Lycée Louis-le-Grand)  17 family home  17–18 gardening  148–57, 159–61 as municipal councillor  112 rentier status  17–19 will  50 works Allee dans le parc, Yerres  153 Autoportrait  20–1, 55 Autoportrait à la barre  35 Autoportrait au chevalet  10, 15–17, 20, 23, 37, 50, 51, 165 Baigneurs, bords de l’Yerres  9, 99 Le basin d’Argenteuil  32 Bateaux à l’ancre sur la Seine  32 La berge du Petit Gennevilliers  32 Boathouse at Argenteuil  156 Canotiers ramant sur l’Yerres  33, 35, 159 Capucines  148, 161

238

Index Chrysanthèmes blancs et jaunes, jardin du Petit Gennevilliers  161 Dahlias cactus rouges  161–3 Le Déjeuner  7, 8, 23, 39, 55, 138, 140 Henri Cordier  136–8 Homme au bain  12, 141–3 Homme au balcon, boulevard Haussmann  99, 100 Homme s’essuyant la jambe  143 Homme sous un parapluie, de face, avec études de mains  92 Intérieur, femme à la fenêtre  9 Intérieur, femme lisant  22, 51, 138 Les Jardiniers  152, 153, 156, 160 Le Jardin potager, Petit Gennevilliers  152, 156, 160, 161 Jeune homme à sa fenêtre  7, 53, 101, 105, 133–4, 138, 142 Jeune homme au piano  7, 8, 24, 153 Linge séchant au bord de la Seine, Petit Gennevilliers  158, 159, 162 Madame Boissière tricotant  9, 153 Marguerites  161 Marine, régates à Villers  31, 32, 55, 99, 159 La mervue de Villerville  31 Nature morte  39, 55 Nu au divan  12, 15, 140–3 Nymphéas sur l’étang  151 Les Orangers  152 Orchidées  148, 149, 161 Le Parc de la propriété Caillebotte à Yerres  152 Parterre de marguerites  147–8 La Partie de bésigue  15, 51, 54, 74, 99 Paysage aux meules  151 Pêche à la ligne  9, 99 Les Peintres en bâtiment  8, 11, 16, 24, 57, 61, 64, 65, 79, 92, 94, 97, 98, 100, 139, 166 Les Peintres en bâtiment, esquisse for  94–5 Périssoires sur l’Yerres  33, 34, 99

Le Pont de l’Europe  8, 11, 15–16, 23–4, 32, 57, 61, 63–5, 67, 79, 87–90, 93, 95, 97, 98, 100, 166 Portrait de Georges Roman  136 Portrait de Jean Daurelle  55, 56 Portrait de jeune femme (Madame Hagen)  51–3 Portrait de Jules Dubois  51 Portrait de Jules Richemont  51 Portrait de l’artiste  4, 21, 23–4 Portrait de Madame Martial Caillebotte  22 Portrait de Monsieur R.  135 Portrait de Richard Gallo  51, 99 Portrait d’Eugène Daufresne, lisant  9, 99 Portraits à la campagne  153 Les raboteurs de parquet  7, 15, 24, 51–2, 66, 101, 105, 106, 113, 128–32, 138, 139, 152, 153, 159, 167 Régates à Argenteuil  10, 17, 25, 33, 35–7, 55–7, 144, 159 Régates en mer à Villerville  32 Roses in the Garden at Petit Gennevilliers  161 Rue de Paris; temps de pluie  8, 11, 16, 23, 32, 57, 61, 63–5, 67, 76, 79, 89–91, 93–8, 100, 139, 166 La Rue Halévy, vue du sixième étage  8, 100 La Seine à Argenteuil, bateaux au mouillage  32 Sunflowers in the Garden at Petit Gennevilliers  161 Tournesols au bord de la Seine  156, 157, 159 Trois Etudes pour des raboteurs: deux études de mains et une étude d’homme agenouillé de face  138 Voiliers en mer  31, 55 Vue de toits (Effet de neige)  99, 100 L’Yerres, effet de lumière  153 L’Yerres, effet de pluie  151, 152 Caillebotte, Madame Charles (aunt)  153

 Index 239 Caillebotte, Martial (brother)  1, 7, 9, 36, 38, 39, 64, 154, see also stamp collecting marriage  10, 54, 56, 99 photographs  40, 155, 161 Gustave à sa table à dessin  160 Gustave Caillebotte gardening at Petit Gennevilliers  162 House, Studio, Garden, and Greenhouse of Gustave Caillebotte at Petit Gennevilliers, The  155 relationship with  40–1 Caillebotte, Martial (father)  7, 17–18, 151 death  10, 41, 43, 166 Caillebotte, René (brother)  7, 8, 53, 138 death  10, 17, 38, 39, 41, 43, 166 portrait of  133–5 Caillebotte Affair (l’Affaire Caillebotte)  2, 51 Caillebotte Bequest (le legs Caillebotte)  50 Callen, Anthea  23, 28, 56, 158–9 Cambry et Cie  17–18, 158 Camille, Michael  45 Castagnary, Jules-Antoine  29 Cercle de la Voile de Paris (CVP)  31, 36, 53, 155, 159 Cérès  80, 81, 83, 84, 89 Cézanne, Paul  27–9, 74, 159 Champ de Mars  83 Chardeau, Jean  33 Charles, Daniel  33, 57 Chaumelin, Marius  30 Chesneau, Ernest  29 Chevreul, Michel Eugène: theory of complementary colour  160, 163 Claretie, Jules  29 Clark, T. J.  2, 96, 113, 167 Clemenceau  30, 115 Clodion, Louis  86 Le Collectionneur de timbres-poste  1, 38 Comité des travaux d’art  107 Commission des Monnaies et Médailles  80

Commune, Paris  4, 30, 78–9, 83, 97, 107, 113, 115 Cordier, Henri  136–8 Cordier Biblioteca Sinica  136 Cormon, Fernand: Une Forge  111 Courbet, Gustave  28, 29, 106, 108, 111 Cousin, Victor  85, 86 Crary, Jonathan  66, 71 Techniques of the Observer  61, 62 Crauzat, M. de: Visite de la Mission chinoise à l’Hôtel des Postes  82 La Croix  70 Cubist painting  75 Dagnan-Bouveret, Pascal  69 Daurelle, Jean  55 Davis, Whitney  66 General Theory of Visual Culture  75 Degas, Edgar  6, 24, 29, 54, 69, 75, 76, 143 ballet scenes  25 Blanchisseuses  106, 154 Les choristes  52 Femme sortant du bain  52 Delcasso, Laurent  84 Dombrowski, André  74 du Camp, Maxime  85 Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde motié du XIXe siècle  83 Durand-Ruel, Paul  147, 149 Duranty, Louis-Emile Edmond  143 La Nouvelle Peinture  23, 133 Dyer, Jennifer  75–7, 97 École spéciale des Langues orientales  136 Elne, Lucien d’  85, 86 Enault, Louis  30 Exposition Universelle  83, 127 false labour of the collector  37, 38, 48, 166, 168 Flaubert, Gustave  45, 83 Fourier, Charles  4 Fournel, Victor  67, 90 French Revolution  4 Freud, Sigmund  42, 75 Fried, Michael  129, 140, 158

240 Galassi, Peter  62, 63, 87, 90, 98 Galland, Pierre-Victor mural scheme for the galerie des métiers of the Paris Hôtel de Ville  109 Gambetta  4, 30 Garb, Tamar  5, 133, 134, 139 ‘Gustave Caillebotte’s Male Figures’  129 Garde Mobile de la Seine  7, 69 Gasquet, Joachim  28 Geffroy, Gustave  1, 19, 147 Gérôme, Jean-Léon  2 Gervex, Henri: 1881 scheme on Le Mariage civil  108 Ghez, Claude  95 Green, Nicholas  107 Groom, Gloria  7, 98, 149 Gueldry, Ferdinand Le Décapage des Métaux  111 La Laboratoire municipal (prefecture de police, boulevard du Palais)  111 Guillaumin, Armand  29 Gwynn, Stephan  150, 161 Hagen, Madame, see Berthier, Charlotte Harrison, Carol E.  31, 44 Harrow, Susan  120, 126 Haussmann  97 Haussmannization of Paris  2, 19, 78, 80 Henriquel-Dupont, Louis Pierre  84 Herbert, Robert. L.  2 Hidalgo y Hidalgo, Miguel, on Mexican stamps  81 Hoschedé, Jean-Pierre  149 Hôtel de Monnaie  80 House, John  150 Hue, Madame  153 Hulot, Anatole  80, 83 ideology  2–3, 28, 41, 45–8, 71–2 postal service  81, 85, 87 Republican  2–4, 6–7, 26–8, 36–7, 44, 72, 96–9, 104, 106–7, 109, 116–18, 126, 128, 185 impressionism  29–31, see also Zola, Émile, under names

Index connection with  41, 56, 67, 158 exhibition with  7–8, 19 gardening and  150–1 philatelic  11, 77–101, 167 Impressionist Exhibition Fourth (1879)  8, 99 Third (1877)  8, 15 Second (1876)  7, 117, 154 Seventh (1882)  19, 147 Impressionist painting collecting  1, 2, 50, 52, 54 Intransigeant (los intransigentes)  29–30 Jacques  66 Jameson, Fredric  127–8 Antinomies of Realism, The  127 Joliet, Charles  85 Joseph (sailor)  10, 36 jouissance  45–9 Le Journal  147 Journal de la Jeunesse  85 Kaiser, Édouard: Atelier de boîtiers  111 Kaplan, Robert  86 Keegen, Kelly  98 Krauss, Rosalind  76, 78, 90, 97 ‘Grids’  76 Kubler, George: ‘rule of series’  75 Lacan, Jacques  4, 45, 47, 55 concept of ‘the gaze’  46, 55 point de capiton  163 Laclau, Ernesto  46 Larousse  18 law of the Father  43, 49 law of the Mother  43, 49 Layraud, Joseph: Le marteau-pilon, forges et aciéries de SaintChamond  111 Legion d’Honneur  107 Lehring, James E.  4 Lemonnier, Camille  66 Lepelletier, E.  66 Lepic, Ludovic-Napoléon  29 Leroy, Louis  29 Lethbridge, Robert  117 Levin, Miriam R.  107 L.G.  66

 Index 241 Lhermitte, Léon  69, 109, 112 La Moisson  109 La paye des moissonneurs  110, 111 Littré, Émile  18 Lloyd, Christopher  33 London Philatelist, The  1, 78 Louis XI  80 Louis-Napoléon  81 Mackay, James A.  72, 73 MacMahon, Patrice de  30 Mallarmé, Stéphane  30 Manet, Edouard  69, 81, 129 Masked Ball at the Opera  24–5 Le Mariage civil  108 Marrinan, Michael  17, 19, 27, 52, 53, 129, 131, 133, 154, 159 Marx, Karl  45 Mathieu, Cardine  99 Mathieu, Oscar: Allégories de la vie du citoyen  108 Maximilian I, Emperor of Mexico  81 Mayeur, Jean-Marie  113 Meissonier, Jean-Louis  69, 84 méthode intuitive  85–6, see also Cousin, Victor Meyer, Alfred  29 Millet, Jean-François  108, 111 Minoret, Marie  99 Mirbeau, Octave  161 Mitchell, Juliet: Siblings  10, 43 Mitterand, Henri  117, 118 Le Monde Illustré  82, 83 Monet, Claude  29, 54, 114, 149–51, 160, 161 Un coin d’appartement  50 Les déchargeurs de charbon  113–15 Nymphéas  149, 150, 163 Moral Order  3, 98, 107 end of  111 Morisot, Berthe  29 Wet Nurse  30 Morton, Mary  2 Mouffe, Chantal  46 Napoléon III  81, 83, 106 Naturalism  6, 11, 67, 69, 109, 167 Le Naturalisme au Salon  117

Nègre, Charles  71 Nelson, Brian  117 Neo-Impressionism  158 Nittis, Giuseppe de  50, 95 Nochlin, Linda  24–5, 30 Body in Pieces, The  24 Noiriel, Gérard  5 Nye, Robert: Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor  129 object lesson  85–6 objet petit a  45, 47, 124 Opium War, Second  82 Opportunists  4 Pasler, Jann  4 La Petite République française  67 Petit Gennevilliers  9, 12, 36, 112, 140, 147–64, 168 Petrey, Sandy  117, 118 philatelic impressionism  11, 77–101, 167 Philatelic Record, The  1, 41, 54, 74 philatelic visuality  40, 56, 64, 74, 79, 80, 96, 98, 151 photographic Naturalism  64–5, 95, 98, 112 photo-painting  99 Pierrot, Nicolas  111 Pietri, Sophie  2 Piketty, Thomas  18, 27 Capital in the Twenty First Century  18 Pissarro, Camille  6, 27–9, 67, 147, 159 Pissarro, Joachim  28 Poignard, Jules  17 Pomian, Krzysztof  44 Pommier, Edouard  112 postage stamps, see stamps Postes, télégraphes et telephones (PTT)  84 post marks  41 Proth, Mario  66 proto-Impressionists  29 Proust, Marcel  75 psychic economy  40 Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre  69, 109, 112 Rabinbach, Anson  118 Les raboteurs de parquet (caricature of)  132–3

242

Index

Raffaëlli, Jean-François  115, 116 Les buveurs d’absinthe  116 Rancière, Jacques  4, 7, 111, 112 La Nuit des prolétaires  4–5 Rapetti, Rodolphe  99 Rauzier, Jean-François  69 realism  69, 167 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste  29, 100 Bal du moulin de la Galette  20, 51 rentier  17–19 Revue horticole  160 Rewald, John  26 Rifkin, Adrien  45 Rivière, Georges  19, 100 Rixens, Jean André: Laminage de l’acier: défournement et enfournement des lingots  111 Rouart, Henri  29 Roussellier, Nicolas  112 Sage, Jules-Auguste  97 Sagraves, Julia  2 Saint-Simon  4 Schwartz, Vanessa  71 Sedgwick, Eve  52–3 serial iteration  75–6 Shackelford, George T. M.  2 Sherman, Daniel J.  91 Shiff, Richard  105, 106 Siege of Paris  83 sînthome  45–6 Sisley, Alfred  29, 31 Sjåstad, Øystein: Theory of the Tache  163 Société anonyme coopérative des artistes-peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs  29–30 Société française de timbrologie  41 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail  133 stamp collecting  11, 39–41, 49, 50, 56, 75 cessation of  10, 54, 99 Mexican stamps  41, 81 ‘plating’ the Sydney View Stamps  74 stamps  1, 62 Peace and Commerce series, blue  97 post marks  40 têtes-bêches  72, 74 timbre de dimension  41

Type Empire  81 Type Empire lauré  81 Type Présidence  81 Type Sage  84, 96, 97 Stein, Gertrude  75 Stewart, Susan  51, 61 false labour of the collector  38, 48, 166 On Longing  48 symbolic identity  41 Taine, Hippolyte  121 Taiping Rebellion  82 Tapling, Thomas Keay  39, 72, 99, 160 Tapling Collection  11, 38, 72–4, 81, 84, 166 France Sheet 8  90 France Sheet 32  73 France Sheet 36  40, 89 temperament  11, 28, 105–6, 113, 117, 133, 135, 137, 138, 143, 167 Thiers, Adolphe  30, 107 Third Republic  2, 3, 6, 18 Thompson, Hannah  121 Thomson, Richard  66, 109 Tilburg, Patricia  4, 85 timbromanie  86 trauma  10, 38, 42–4, 49, 55, 64, 76, 159 of bereavement  10, 38, 39, 42, 43, 53, 166 Union des yachts français (UYF)  36 Union postale universelle  80–1 Vaisse, Pierre  107 Varnedoe, Kirk  7, 33, 62, 63, 98 Vassy, Gaston  15, 19, 26 Vermeer  27 Victoria, Queen, on postage stamp, in Britain  81 visuality in paintings  24, 33, 36, 66 philatelic  40, 56, 64, 74, 79, 80, 96, 98, 151 photographic  69, 98, 116 Warhol, Andy  75 War of the French Intervention  81

 Index 243 Weber, Eugen  18, 113 Weisberg, Gabriel  4, 69, 108 White, Claire  3, 121 Williams, L. N.: Fundamentals of Philately  48–9 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  75 Wittmer, Pierre  152 Wollf, Albert  30 Woolf, Virginia  75 Le Yacht  31, 164 yachting  31–6, 54–6 Chantier Luce  31 designs  154–5, 159 international handicapping system (la jauge Caillebotte)  31 Iris  31 Roastbeef  10, 25–6, 33–4, 36, 57 Yerres estate  33, 153–4 Young, Marnin  19, 69, 110, 115, 129, 131

Žižek, Slavoj  3, 41, 45–8 Sublime Object of Ideology, The  45 Zola, Émile  12, 28, 69, 105–6, 133, 135, 143–4, 167–8 critiques on  116, 154 Jeune homme à sa fenêtre  11, 101, 133 Les raboteurs de parquet  11, 66, 101, 105 defence of Manet  116 works L’Argent  127 L’Assommoir  11, 117–19, 121–6, 128, 130–1, 134, 139–41, 143, 154, 167 Au Bonheur des Dames  71, 127 La débâcle  127 Le docteur Pascal  128 Le Naturalisme au Salon  117 Les Rougon-Macquart  117 Le Ventre de Paris  127

244

Plates

Plate 1  Gustave Caillebotte, Les raboteurs de parquet, 1875. 102 × 145 cm, oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, RF 2718.

Plate 2  Gustave Caillebotte, Rue de Paris; temps de pluie, 1877. 212 × 276 cm, oil on canvas. The Art Institute, Chicago, 1964.336.

Plate 3 Gustave Caillebotte, Régates à Argenteuil, 1893, oil on canvas. Private Collection.

Plate 4 Tapling Collection, France Sheet 8. Stamp album sheet. British Library, Philatelic Collections.

Plate 5  Gustave Caillebotte, Portrait de l’artiste, c. 1892. 40.5 × 32.5 cm, oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, RF 1971 14.

Plate 6  Gustave Caillebotte, La Partie de bésigue, c. 1881. 121 × 161 cm, oil on canvas. Louvre Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi.

Plate 7  Gustave Caillebotte, Nu au divan, c. 1880. 129.5 × 195.6 cm, oil on canvas. Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 67.67.

Plate 8  Gustave Caillebotte, Les Jardiniers, 1877. 90 × 117 cm, oil on canvas. Private Collection, France.