Family, Chrysler, the AIC

Here is the part most often gotten wrong, so we start by separating it cleanly. When Gustave Caillebotte died in 1894, he left a famous bequest of paintings to the French State — about sixty-seven canvases of work by his friends and the painters he’d quietly been keeping afloat for two decades: Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Cézanne, Sisley, Manet, Degas, and Morisot. The state, after months of haggling with Caillebotte’s executors, eventually accepted about forty of the sixty-seven works and turned down the rest. (This is the Caillebotte bequest, and the fight over it is one of the great squabbles in the history of nineteenth-century French museum-keeping. The full story belongs in the movement read, not here.) Renoir’s Bal du moulin de la Galette— the giant sunlit Sunday-dance picture — was one of the works the state accepted, and it has been on public view in Paris ever since.

Paris Street; Rainy Day was not in that bequest. This is the single most important factual point in this chapter, because the confusion is so common it deserves the chapter’s opening line: the picture in this chapter is not one of the Caillebotte-bequest pictures. It stayed in the family. The bequest was the paintings Caillebotte had bought from other people— his collection. The pictures he had painted himself, including this one, stayed his own family’s property. Don’t mix the two.

So the picture’s actual story after 1894 is quieter and more private than the bequest fight would suggest. It went, by inheritance, to Caillebotte’s brother Martial Caillebotte and his wife Marie. In 1900 it was deposited at a country house called the Château de Montglat, in Provins, southeast of Paris, in the care of Martial’s brother-in-law Georges Minoret. In 1950 it passed by inheritance to Martial’s daughter Geneviève Chardeauand her husband Albert. Until that year — fifty-six years after the painter’s death — the canvas had never left the family. It had been hung in Paris apartments, deposited in country houses, looked at by relatives and the rare invited guest. It had not been to a major exhibition in any meaningful sense since 1894. Almost nobody outside the family had seen it for two generations.

Which means that when, in 1954 or 1955, the painting was finally sold out of the Caillebotte family for the first time — to the American industrialist Walter P. Chrysler Jr. (1909–1988), son of the automobile magnate Walter P. Chrysler, and a major and slightly ill-disciplined collector who at one point owned what he claimed was the largest private art collection in the United States — the picture’s reentry into the wider world was almost like a rediscovery. Paris Street; Rainy Day had been famous in 1877, then privately remembered for half a century, then near-invisible. Now it was suddenly in New York, in a private collection, and people who knew about Caillebotte realized one of his masterpieces had just changed continents.

It moved one more time. In 1964 the painting passed from Chrysler to the New York art dealer Wildenstein & Co., and Wildenstein resold it the same year to the Art Institute of Chicago through the Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection fund. The Art Institute logged it under accession number 1964.336. There the painting has stayed. It hangs in Gallery 201, on the east side of the Grand Staircase of the Art Institute — one of the first paintings most Chicago museum-goers encounter, and the picture the Institute most often uses on its posters and tote bags. The painting that was almost invisible for sixty years is now one of the most-photographed Impressionist works in America.

Stand back from the arc of this. A wealthy young engineer in Paris paints a nine-foot picture of his own neighborhood on a wet morning. He hangs it at a breakaway exhibition where it is, paradoxically, the leastImpressionist canvas in the show. The critics aren’t sure what to make of it. The painter dies young, and the picture stays in the family for over half a century — kept by a brother, then a niece, then a great-niece, hanging on private walls in private houses. An American industrialist with a habit of swallowing collections buys it. A New York dealer flips it. And it ends up in Chicago, on permanent view, becoming one of the most recognized images of nineteenth-century Paris in the world. The picture’s whole afterlife is the long swing from private to public — a private commission of a private morning, kept privately for two generations, finally sold across an ocean and turned into a public icon of a city it hadn’t lived in for nearly a century. Caillebotte’s bequest, the famous one, is in Paris. His own great picture of Paris is in Chicago. Sit with that for a second. The historical irony is the picture’s last quiet joke.