Drawings and Pastels

Gustave Caillebotte’s drawings let us watch him decide where a picture should begin, how a body should turn and how a street should open into the distance. In the architectural study for Paris Street, Rainy Day, soft, searching pencil marks coexist with sharper ruled lines. The sheet preserves observation and revision together, making the finished painting’s apparently sudden encounter look newly deliberate. ^[1]

Other works on paper had a different purpose. Caillebotte exhibited pastels as finished pictures, including landscapes of Yerres, while his surviving sketchbook brings together riverbanks, colour notes, portraits, copies after earlier art and architectural measurements. Taken together, these works reveal a practice extending from patient preparation to independent experiments with line and colour. ^{[2] [3]}

Studying the body at work

The sheets associated with The Floor Scrapers isolate actions that can be difficult to disentangle in the painting. On one upright sheet, three studies show kneeling men leaning forward. Their repeated posture becomes a set of variations: the head drops, the shoulders turn and the arms converge towards the hands. On another, horizontal sheet, enlarged studies of hands share the paper with a bent figure. Caillebotte could examine a grip at one scale and the movement of the whole body at another. Marie Berhaut’s catalogue reproduces these as two sheets, numbered 33A and 33B; the three figures on the first sheet are not three separate drawings. ^[4]

These studies give particular weight to the point where bodily effort meets a tool. With the room and most accessories removed, we notice how the arms bear down, how the knees support the torso and how fingers close around an implement. The Musée d’Orsay places the painting’s preparatory method within Caillebotte’s academic training: separately drawn parts could be transferred to canvas through squaring. Its account stresses the precision of his observation of gestures and equipment. The drawings make that precision tangible before the workers enter the long perspective of the floorboards. ^[6]

The House Painters studies pose related problems with clothed figures. Berhaut reproduces a standing man in right profile, a worker seen through a ladder and another positioned on a ladder. The ladder’s narrow rungs interrupt the body; the coat falls around a bent knee; a raised head changes the outline of the shoulders. The standing figure did not enter the definitive composition in that form, according to the catalogue. A preparatory sheet can therefore preserve an option that a finished picture has discarded. ^[4]

Paul Perrin, curator of the Musée d’Orsay’s Caillebotte: Painting Men exhibition, connects these drawn groups with the artist’s attention to workers’ gestures, postures and silhouettes, and to the way effort registers in their bodies. This is a useful way to look at them: the action is carried by a particular arrangement of limbs and clothing. Repetition helps Caillebotte distinguish one arrangement from another. ^[7]

The surviving studies also resist a simple procession from rough to polished. A carefully drawn worker may be omitted, while a small, rapidly indicated figure can establish a relationship needed in the painting. Different descriptive titles sometimes refer to the same sheet, and one sheet may hold several studies. Looking at the actual arrangement on the paper is more revealing than counting every pose or caption as a separate object. ^[4]

Building a Paris street on paper

The Art Institute of Chicago’s Study for “Paris Street; Rainy Day” provides unusually close evidence of this movement between looking and constructing. The tan laid-paper sheet measures 30.2 × 46.5 cm. Most of the first drawing was made freehand in soft graphite; harder pencil lines were then ruled over parts of it, while a little charcoal was used in revisions near the top. The difference between these marks matters. One set records the observed street, while another stabilises and changes its perspective. ^[1]

Kelly Keegan’s curatorial analysis follows the adjustments closely. Caillebotte revised the apparent height of the viewpoint and the relationship between buildings, pavement and street. The sloping intersection complicated the establishment of a horizon. Tick marks and crosses helped him organise vanishing points, and he brought elements that would ordinarily require different vanishing points into a common arrangement. The drawing’s accuracy thus coexists with deliberate alterations to the view. ^[1]

At first the sheet seems almost entirely architectural. Yet the tiny zigzags in the distance already suggest pedestrians, and the large curved form towards the right is an umbrella: infrared imaging makes its scalloped underside easier to read. Its scale anticipates the confrontation between nearby figures and receding streets that dominates the completed Paris Street, Rainy Day. The great umbrella arrives before the foreground couple has been fully specified. Space and figures are developing in relation to one another, even when they are drawn separately. ^[1]

Microscopic examination adds another dimension. Conservator Antoinette Owen documented toolmarks at fifty-seven locations across the drawing, including points on the horizon and around the lamppost. A pointed measuring device, probably calipers or something similar, could have made them. When distances between selected marks were multiplied by approximately seven, they corresponded closely to equivalent distances in the large canvas. There is no squared grid on this particular sheet. Measurement offered another means of carrying its design into paint. ^[1]

Even cropping remained open to adjustment. Caillebotte first framed the image with ruled graphite margins, then lowered its upper boundary with a charcoal line, excluding more of the lamppost and the buildings to the right. The toolmarks occur on the revised upper boundary rather than the abandoned one, helping establish the sequence of decisions. What looks like an incidental line around a sketch is evidence of the image being edited. ^[1]

The sheet also has a history distinct from that of the painting. Caillebotte’s family gave it to the scholar Kirk Varnedoe in 1976; it later passed to Elyn Zimmerman and entered the Art Institute in 2011. The museum’s possession of both objects has made comparisons between the paper and canvas especially productive. Their present proximity should not obscure their separate journeys through collections. ^[1]

Figures before they enter the street

The separate figure studies for Paris Street, Rainy Day show another kind of editing. Berhaut reproduces the foreground couple together beneath their umbrella, women seen from behind and in profile, and crossing men. A further sheet sets a man walking under an umbrella beside a smaller study of a man lighting his pipe. The catalogue relates the walking figure to the completed picture and records that the pipe-lighting figure was not taken up. The shared subject of pedestrians in rain did not make every observed action equally useful. ^[4]

These sheets allow closer attention to the work done by clothes and accessories. An umbrella establishes a broad arc above a body; the hand gripping its shaft fixes an arm; a coat opening around a leg helps make a stride legible. By drawing people apart from the architecture, Caillebotte could investigate these relationships at a scale where they remained visible. They would later contribute to a street whose scattered figures seem to have met by chance. The grouped studies preserve choices behind that appearance. ^[4]

The photographic effect and the work behind it

Varnedoe’s foreword to Jean Chardeau’s Les dessins de Caillebotte described the excitement of finding perspective and figure studies preserved by the family. For him, their significance lay in the combination of modern subjects with patient, traditional construction. Ruled space and separately studied figures helped produce an unfamiliar vision of contemporary life. His comparison with Seurat is a critical analogy about this relationship between modernity and order. ^[8]

Perrin interprets Caillebotte’s preparatory practice as serving a strong compositional idea: the artist devised an image and then made the studies needed to realise it. This is the curator’s synthesis, rather than a documented rule for every work. The Chicago street sheet lets us test such an account against an object on which the composition itself continued to change. ^[7]

The optical question needs greater precision. Gloria Groom and Kelly Keegan, working with Pablo Garcia, proposed that a camera lucida helped Caillebotte make the initial street drawing. A camera lucida uses a prism to let an artist see a virtual image of the scene together with the paper; it does not take a photograph. Their reconstruction produced a persuasive match with the initial view, but they explicitly reported that no documentary evidence confirmed Caillebotte’s use of the device. ^[1]

That proposal belongs beside the physical evidence of freehand marks, redrawn perspective, measurement and subsequent changes. The street was still being reformulated after the first observation. Groom and Keegan also describe the oil sketch now at the Musée Marmottan Monet as a continuing testing ground for figures and atmosphere, rather than a single completed step between drawing and final canvas. Drawing, oil sketch and large painting could remain active parts of the same developing problem. ^[1]

The SCHIRN Kunsthalle’s exhibition on Caillebotte and photography offered comparisons between his abrupt cropping, steep viewpoints and later photographic images. Such comparisons can sharpen our awareness of how surprising his compositions remain. They do not by themselves establish a photographic source for an individual picture. The preparatory sheets offer firmer evidence of the decisions through which a seemingly immediate view was made. ^[9]

Pastels made for exhibition

Preparatory drawings are only one part of Caillebotte’s work on paper. His pastels include finished landscapes and portraits, and their public presentation gives them a different status from a sheet of working studies. Galina Olmsted identifies 1879 as the first Impressionist exhibition at which he showed pastels. Among them were Jardin Potager, Yerres and Vallée de l’Yerres, both dated 1877. The former measures 41 × 54 cm and the latter 57 × 72 cm: substantial pictures, comparable in scale to oils he exhibited. ^[2]

Both were signed and dated. Olmsted notes that Caillebotte chose to exhibit the pastel of the kitchen garden even though he had treated the setting in oil around the same period. The pastel was therefore a deliberate public choice. Calling it a study merely because it is a work on paper would conceal its role in the exhibition. Medium, degree of finish and intended use have to be considered separately. ^[2]

Olmsted interprets this broader presentation in relation to the success of Degas’s pastels and pastelised monotypes, some of which Caillebotte owned and lent. Her account makes a connection between collecting and experimentation without making the two artists’ subjects interchangeable. Caillebotte’s Yerres landscapes and family portraits allowed him to explore a medium associated with Degas while retaining a different environment and range of motifs. ^[2]

A particularly clear example is Bather or Diver, catalogued by the Musée d’Orsay as Le Nageur, with the alternative title Baigneurs. Dated 1877, it is a pastel on paper measuring 69 × 88.5 cm. The bending figure’s striped bathing costume makes the curve of the body easy to follow, while an upright, robed figure is cut by the right edge. The scene gives an everyday action an abrupt compositional setting. Its breadth and developed arrangement make it a valuable companion to the landscape pastels. ^{[10] [4]}

The distinction also helps explain why a catalogue titled Paintings and Pastels cannot be treated as a list exclusively of oil paintings. Berhaut’s revised catalogue places different kinds of objects within a common numbered sequence and records preparatory works alongside more familiar pictures. A title such as “study” describes a function; it does not identify the material. The small oil studies for The Floor Scrapers and Paris Street, Rainy Day remain paintings, however closely they belong to a discussion of drawing and preparation. ^[4]

A sketchbook carried through several years

Caillebotte’s surviving sketchbook shifts the emphasis towards repeated encounters with places and things. Used between June 1883 and September 1887, it is small enough to carry, with sheets measuring 11.4 × 19.5 cm and a brown cloth binding. Antoinette Owen’s examination established that it originally contained forty-eight sheets, counting the front and back pastedowns. Eight sheets were cut out; graphite survives on their narrow stubs. The forty remaining sheets belong to this bound working object. ^[3]

Its physical design suited use away from the studio. A loop inside the back cover could hold a pencil, while remnants of fastening tabs survive outside. Graphite predominates: thirty remaining sheets use it alone, seven combine it with watercolour, and three combine graphite with brush and grey wash. This variety sits within one volume, allowing the same artist to move between linear observation, tonal arrangement and colour. ^[3]

Nancy Ireson’s curatorial account, with Julie Warchol contributing the entries for sheets 32–34, draws attention to its range. Views around Vétheuil recur, but the choice of angle changes. A pollarded willow occupies the centre of one composition and moves towards the side in another. Looking across these pages, we see how a familiar motif could be rearranged while retaining its recognisable character. The position of a tree becomes a compositional decision that can be tried again on another leaf. ^[3]

Colour could be stored in words as well as washes. On a wooded view made at Chaudry in August 1884, Caillebotte wrote names for blue, grey and lilac, together with indications of sunlight. The words preserve distinctions of hue alongside the pencil’s divisions of light and shade. Nearby, a watercolour of woodland builds the greens through layered applications while leaving much of the sky as bare paper. The two approaches let us compare a notation for a possible future picture with colour already present on the page. ^[3]

Scientific examination of selected watercolours identified pigments including ultramarine, Prussian blue, emerald green and chrome yellow. Some identifications remained provisional, especially those involving organic colourants. These results belong to the examined watercolours; they do not define a single palette for Caillebotte’s entire career. Owen also observed that enclosure within the book had protected sensitive colours from light, helping explain their freshness. The binding is part of the history of what we can still see. ^[3]

The book preserves interruptions as well as accomplishments. Some drawings remain unresolved, and dates do not always follow the order of the leaves. Ireson relates the experiments to a letter Caillebotte sent Monet in June 1883, in which he complained of the difficulty of painting flowering trees before their blossoms disappeared. Read through this published correspondence, the unfinished pages acquire a practical context: seasonal change could outpace a painter’s attempts to understand it. No lost finished canvas need be invented for each sketch. ^[3]

Portraits and studies of hands interrupt the landscape sequence. A boy’s softly shaded face appears frontally; the Chicago authors leave his identity uncertain. Elsewhere, two studies of clasped hands approach the same subject with different degrees of definition, one barely indicating the knuckles. Ireson contrasts their loose treatment with the more emphatic working hands associated with The Floor Scrapers. The comparison is valuable because it shows drawing responding to a different kind of gesture. Any relationship to a finished portrait remains unconfirmed. ^[3]

Copying, measuring and looking beyond the familiar

The sketchbook’s copies after earlier art broaden this picture of Caillebotte’s interests. A kneeling figure after Eustache Le Sueur bears a Louvre inscription and the date 9 October 1884. A later copy after Watteau concentrates on the folds and fastenings of a woman’s dress, giving much less attention to her face. These pages show selective looking: Caillebotte could extract a figure or a feature without reproducing the full character of its source. The Chicago account identifies the earlier works; it does not establish a continuous programme of museum study. ^[3]

At Blois in August 1886 he turned towards Saint-Nicolas, drawing the church and a carved relief inside it. At Chaumont he copied a heraldic sculpture above a doorway. In their entries for these sheets, Ireson and Warchol distinguish the treatment of outlines, shadow and ornamental forms. These are encounters with older architecture and sculpture by an artist chiefly associated with modern Paris. The subjects widen his field of attention without requiring us to assign them a hidden programme. ^[3]

Towards the back of the book, architectural sketches carry measurements. Their association with details at the Château de Blois is an identification reported by the Chicago authors from Christopher Lloyd’s research. Their precise purpose remains uncertain. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition is striking: the artist who ruled the streets of modern Paris also recorded the proportions of older buildings. Measured drawing remained useful beyond the preparation of his celebrated urban canvases. ^[3]

Drawing late in his career

The Cleveland Museum of Art’s Study of a Man with Hands in His Pockets takes us to 1893. The museum identifies its sitter as Caillebotte’s friend Eugène Lamy and relates the figure to Bank of the Seine at Petit Gennevilliers, Winter. In black chalk on laid paper, the drawing makes clothing carry the action: hatching tightens the jacket across the back, while folds in the trousers convey the hands pushed into pockets. ^[5]

Cleveland’s conservation account describes reinforced strokes, small smudges and traces of erasure. The paper’s texture breaks the chalk into a fine pattern of dark marks and pale interruptions. This handling differs visibly from the ruled architectural study of 1877, yet both sheets make small adjustments consequential. Drawing continued to serve the observation and positioning of figures near the end of Caillebotte’s life. ^[5]

Drawing within a varied working practice

The surviving paper studies should not impose a single method on every painting. Technical examination in Cologne found a sketchy brush lay-in, without a discernible detailed preliminary drawing, in Garden in Trouville. In Boats and Shed on the Banks of the Seine, blue crayon underdrawing survives beneath the paint; rejected boat outlines indicate that Caillebotte inverted the canvas and began the composition again. The evidence changes with the object. ^[11]

Nor does fluent brushwork automatically make an oil a preparatory sketch. Writing about the Van Gogh Museum’s View from a Balcony (Berhaut 147), Sjraar van Heugten describes the ironwork being established first and the pale background added after drying. He argues that this considered, staged execution supports its status as an independent picture. A useful distinction emerges across the media: rapid-looking marks can belong to a finished work, and meticulous marks can belong to a working sheet. ^[12]

Original printmaking adds a further branch. The Petit Palais records Caillebotte’s Portrait of Paul Hugot of 1878 as drypoint and etching on laid paper. Although printed lines can resemble drawn ones, an impression made from a worked plate has a different material history from a unique drawing. The prints and reproductions page follows that distinction further. Here, the drawings and pastels already show how widely Caillebotte varied the relationship between observation, preparation and a picture ready to be seen. ^[13]