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Lot Essay
Painted in 1876, Le Déjeuner is among the best-known early masterpieces by the esteemed Impressionist painter, Gustave Caillebotte. A rich study of the play of light and reflections within the confines of a sumptuous domestic interior, the painting depicts a quiet afternoon meal shared by the artist with his widowed mother Céleste and brother René in the dining room of their family home in Paris. Appearing on the market for the first time in its history, the work has remained in the artist’s family for over 130 years, passing from his estate to his beloved youngest brother Martial, and thence by descent to the present owner. Through the past century, the family have been generous custodians of the work, loaning it to a number of important exhibitions dedicated to Caillebotte’s oeuvre, including the landmark retrospective “Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist” in 1994, as well as the highly acclaimed recent show “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men,” which travelled from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, to The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and The Art Institute of Chicago through 2024-2025.
Le Déjeuner is one of a trio of intimate family portraits Caillebotte created over the course of 1875-1876, in which the artist offers an intensely personal view into the everyday routines that governed bourgeois life in Paris. The other works in this acclaimed group are Jeune homme à sa fenêtre (Berhaut, no. 32; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), showing René gazing out of an open window within the house, and Jeune homme au piano (Berhaut, no. 36; Artizon Museum, Tokyo), portraying Martial, a student at the conservatoire in Paris, practicing his craft at the piano.
What we need is the particular note of the modern individual, in his clothing, in the midst of his social habits, at home or in the street…”Edmond Duranty, La nouvelle peinture, 1876.
Though they feature carefully observed depictions of the artist’s family, each scene is more aligned to genre painting than traditional portraiture. Located within the elegant, haute-bourgeois environment in which the family lived, these compositions focus on the mundane, everyday moments that marked the artist’s existence during these years, the familiar sights and scenes that took place within the private confines of his home on the corner of rue de Miromesnil and rue de Lisbonne in Paris’s 8th arrondissement.
In Le Déjeuner, Caillebotte depicts the quotidian ritual of the household’s mid-day meal. At the far side of the table sits Madame Caillebotte, her black attire a signal she is still in mourning for her late husband, while the family’s butler, Jean Daurelle, hovers by her left shoulder as he prepares to serve her from a platter. To their right, René forges ahead with his meal, his head bent and intently focused on carving something on his plate, oblivious to the social decorum of waiting for the rest of the table to be served before beginning. The highly polished mahogany table-top is filled with gleaming silverware and an array of crystal glasses, carafes and dishes, their decorative surfaces and elegant shapes catching the light that filters through the delicate gauze curtains of the windows behind Mme. Caillebotte. The scene is captured from the perspective of the artist as he sits at the end of the table, his empty plate appearing like a pale half-moon at the lower edge of the canvas alongside a glass of wine, as he waits for his own turn to be served. In this way, Caillebotte places himself as both a part of this world and a detached observer, watching and absorbing the scene around him in all its quiet ordinariness.
The scene takes place in the dining room of the Caillebotte family home on the corner of rue de Miromesnil and rue de Lisbonne in Paris’s fashionable 8th arrondissement. Inspired by the rhythms of this private space, Caillebotte set several other early masterpieces within the confines of his home, including Les raboteurs de parquet and Jeune homme à sa fenêtre.
Caillebotte was drawn to painting the people closest to him during these years. Here, he portrays his mother, Madame Céleste Caillebotte alongside the family’s steward or butler, Jean Daurelle, who had been employed by the Caillebottes for years. The artist would create two other portraits of Daurelle over the following decade, as well as several pastels of his young son, Camille.
The third character in the painting is Caillebotte’s closest brother in age, René, who is seated to his right. Not waiting for the rest of the table to be served, René starts eagerly on his meal, his attention focused entirely on his plate. Beside his left hand there appears to be a half-eaten bread-roll or piece of fruit, further underscoring René’s impatience for lunch to start.
An elegant array of glassware is spread across the table, the brilliant light creating a myriad of reflections in the highly-polished table-top. Caillebotte would later inherit a selection of these items, following his mother’s death in 1878, and bring them with him to his new home after the rue de Miromesnil house was sold. Caillebotte would include several pieces in his later still-life painting, Nature morte: Verres, carafes et compotiers de fruits (circa 1879).
Caillebotte carefully plotted the composition in advance, working on a number of different sketches and studies relating to the figures, including several drawings that explore different permutations of René’s pose. Originally, the artist intended to portray his brother distracted by a book he had brought to the dinner table, showing him completely absorbed by the story, the tome propped open on top of his plate. As he progressed through his pencil and charcoal studies, his depiction of René shifted, so that instead his entire focus is trained on quickly consuming the meal before him.
Little is known of the mysterious René, the second-to-youngest member of the Caillebotte household, who was to unexpectedly die the same year the present work was created, at the age of twenty-five. From various references in the family records, including the state of his affairs at the time of his passing, it would appear that he was a somewhat restless spirit who never took a profession, while the rack of debts he accrued in the months leading up to his death suggest a stylish, hedonistic lifestyle. Here, Caillebotte conveys an impression of René’s impatient, impulsive nature, his eagerness to flee the confines of the dining room perhaps a reflection of his desire to break free from the obligations of family life.
Throughout Le Déjeuner, the artist pays close attention to the sumptuous decoration and furnishings of the Caillebotte home. From the warm golden hues of the wallpaper and soft furnishings, offset by the vibrant red carpet, with its semi-abstract pattern of arabesques, to the detailing of the wall paneling and the pattern of the lace curtains, Caillebotte picks out the subtle signs of luxury and refinement within this deeply familiar environment. In the far corner of the room, a large wooden sideboard sits flush against the wall, its shelves containing a carefully curated display of porcelain and silverware.
Caillebotte’s interiors show his fascination with objects and textures: the patterns of the upholstery, the grids created by wall paneling, and the reflective surfaces of a table or piano top.Gloria Groom
As curator Gloria Groom has noted, for Caillebotte the family home “was a symbol of his heritage—that of the industrious, entrepreneurial, pious, and conservative grande bourgeoisie” (“Interiors and Portraits” in A. Distel, et. al., Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist, exh. cat., The Art Institute of Chicago, 1994, p. 180). Three empty chairs have been pushed away from the table and placed directly in front of the windows, perhaps symbolizing the family members missing from the lunch hour gathering—the artist’s older half-brother Alfred, his youngest brother, Martial, and the patriarch of the family, who had passed away in 1874.
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Le Déjeuner is Caillebotte’s daring treatment of space within the scene, particularly the extreme, oblique perspective of the table. Described in family inventories as a “large round table on a single pedestal leg,” one contemporary commentator noted that it appeared “twelve meters long” in the painting (quoted in ibid., p. 194). To achieve this effect, Caillebotte stretches its surface area, depicting the edge of the table in a grand, sweeping curve that dominates the room, creating a strange, telescopic distortion of the space. The oversized nature of the table accentuates the feeling of distance, both physical and psychological, between the different protagonists, perhaps providing a glimpse into the familial tensions at play behind the scenes of this seemingly proper and mundane event. In this way, Le Déjeuner is a family portrait laden with hidden depth and meaning, providing an intimate insight into the internal dynamics of the Caillebotte family at this particular moment in time.
Caillebotte chose to include Le Déjeuner in the Second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876, his first foray into the activities of the revolutionary group. Several commentators remarked upon the artist’s participation, singling him out as a mature painter of great promise and a bold new voice within the movement. Marius Chaumelin, for example, proclaimed: “Caillebotte is one of the most original painters to have come forward in some time, and I am not afraid I shall compromise myself by predicting that he will be famous before long” (quoted in C.S. Moffett, ed., The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874-1886, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1986, p. 167). The present painting was in fact one of four works on the theme of the luncheon to appear in the show—Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Berthe Morisot also exhibited paintings depicting the subject that year. While the other three focused on the effervescent play of light and atmosphere of an exterior, plein-air setting, Caillebotte’s painting transports the viewer into the very heart of the private world of the artist.
Caillebotte’s scenes of contemporary life proved pivotal in shaping the public reception of Impressionism during its early years, most notably for their importance to the writings of Edmond Duranty. Duranty was among the first critics to salute the Impressionist movement—his seminal essay, La nouvelle peinture: A propos du groupe d’artistes qui expose dans les Galeries Durand-Ruel, a thirty-eight page pamphlet written in response to the 1876 exhibition, was the first substantial publication written on the subject of impressionism. In its pages, Duranty celebrated the style, technique and novel subjects of these revolutionary painters, and in particular the unique brand of naturalism found in the work of Caillebotte and Degas, which he believed removed “the partition separating the studio from everyday life…” (La nouvelle peinture, reproduced in L. Nochlin, ed., Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 1874-1904: Sources and Documents, New Jersey, 1966, p. 5).
Reading through the essay, there are clear indications that Duranty was formulating his theories with Caillebotte’s paintings in mind. At home, Duranty writes, “the individual will be at a piano… He will be having lunch with his family or sitting in his armchair near his worktable, absorbed in thought…” (quoted in Impressionist Interiors, exh. cat., The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 2008, p. 33). Similarly, his discussion of the importance of shifting viewpoints appears to correspond directly to works such as Le Déjeuner: “Views of people and things have a thousand ways of being unexpected in reality. Our point of view is not always in the center of a room with two lateral walls receding towards that of the rear; it does not always gather together along these lines and angles of cornices with a mathematical regularity and symmetry… [One’s viewpoint] is sometimes very high, sometimes very low, missing the ceiling, getting at objects from their undersides, unexpectedly cutting off the furniture…” (op. cit., 1966, p. 6).
While Caillebotte’s painterly interests soon moved outside to the streets of Paris, depicting the play of life within the modern cityscape, his intricately detailed and psychologically nuanced interior paintings would have an important impact on a generation of younger artists through the ensuing decades. The pointillist, Paul Signac, for example, who was a close friend of Caillebotte’s, appears to directly invoke Le Déjeuner in the compositional structure and play of reflections in his painting La salle à manger, Opus 152 (1886-1887; Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo). Similarly, the artists of the Nabis movement, including Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, would repeatedly explore the intimate interiors of their friends and acquaintances, blending the traditions of portraiture and genre painting in their compositions, with a particular emphasis on the interactions of various family members around a table, as they ate together throughout the day.
Le Déjeuner is one of a trio of intimate family portraits Caillebotte created over the course of 1875-1876, in which the artist offers an intensely personal view into the everyday routines that governed bourgeois life in Paris. The other works in this acclaimed group are Jeune homme à sa fenêtre (Berhaut, no. 32; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), showing René gazing out of an open window within the house, and Jeune homme au piano (Berhaut, no. 36; Artizon Museum, Tokyo), portraying Martial, a student at the conservatoire in Paris, practicing his craft at the piano.
What we need is the particular note of the modern individual, in his clothing, in the midst of his social habits, at home or in the street…”Edmond Duranty, La nouvelle peinture, 1876.
Though they feature carefully observed depictions of the artist’s family, each scene is more aligned to genre painting than traditional portraiture. Located within the elegant, haute-bourgeois environment in which the family lived, these compositions focus on the mundane, everyday moments that marked the artist’s existence during these years, the familiar sights and scenes that took place within the private confines of his home on the corner of rue de Miromesnil and rue de Lisbonne in Paris’s 8th arrondissement.
In Le Déjeuner, Caillebotte depicts the quotidian ritual of the household’s mid-day meal. At the far side of the table sits Madame Caillebotte, her black attire a signal she is still in mourning for her late husband, while the family’s butler, Jean Daurelle, hovers by her left shoulder as he prepares to serve her from a platter. To their right, René forges ahead with his meal, his head bent and intently focused on carving something on his plate, oblivious to the social decorum of waiting for the rest of the table to be served before beginning. The highly polished mahogany table-top is filled with gleaming silverware and an array of crystal glasses, carafes and dishes, their decorative surfaces and elegant shapes catching the light that filters through the delicate gauze curtains of the windows behind Mme. Caillebotte. The scene is captured from the perspective of the artist as he sits at the end of the table, his empty plate appearing like a pale half-moon at the lower edge of the canvas alongside a glass of wine, as he waits for his own turn to be served. In this way, Caillebotte places himself as both a part of this world and a detached observer, watching and absorbing the scene around him in all its quiet ordinariness.
The scene takes place in the dining room of the Caillebotte family home on the corner of rue de Miromesnil and rue de Lisbonne in Paris’s fashionable 8th arrondissement. Inspired by the rhythms of this private space, Caillebotte set several other early masterpieces within the confines of his home, including Les raboteurs de parquet and Jeune homme à sa fenêtre.
Caillebotte was drawn to painting the people closest to him during these years. Here, he portrays his mother, Madame Céleste Caillebotte alongside the family’s steward or butler, Jean Daurelle, who had been employed by the Caillebottes for years. The artist would create two other portraits of Daurelle over the following decade, as well as several pastels of his young son, Camille.
The third character in the painting is Caillebotte’s closest brother in age, René, who is seated to his right. Not waiting for the rest of the table to be served, René starts eagerly on his meal, his attention focused entirely on his plate. Beside his left hand there appears to be a half-eaten bread-roll or piece of fruit, further underscoring René’s impatience for lunch to start.
An elegant array of glassware is spread across the table, the brilliant light creating a myriad of reflections in the highly-polished table-top. Caillebotte would later inherit a selection of these items, following his mother’s death in 1878, and bring them with him to his new home after the rue de Miromesnil house was sold. Caillebotte would include several pieces in his later still-life painting, Nature morte: Verres, carafes et compotiers de fruits (circa 1879).
Caillebotte carefully plotted the composition in advance, working on a number of different sketches and studies relating to the figures, including several drawings that explore different permutations of René’s pose. Originally, the artist intended to portray his brother distracted by a book he had brought to the dinner table, showing him completely absorbed by the story, the tome propped open on top of his plate. As he progressed through his pencil and charcoal studies, his depiction of René shifted, so that instead his entire focus is trained on quickly consuming the meal before him.
Little is known of the mysterious René, the second-to-youngest member of the Caillebotte household, who was to unexpectedly die the same year the present work was created, at the age of twenty-five. From various references in the family records, including the state of his affairs at the time of his passing, it would appear that he was a somewhat restless spirit who never took a profession, while the rack of debts he accrued in the months leading up to his death suggest a stylish, hedonistic lifestyle. Here, Caillebotte conveys an impression of René’s impatient, impulsive nature, his eagerness to flee the confines of the dining room perhaps a reflection of his desire to break free from the obligations of family life.
Throughout Le Déjeuner, the artist pays close attention to the sumptuous decoration and furnishings of the Caillebotte home. From the warm golden hues of the wallpaper and soft furnishings, offset by the vibrant red carpet, with its semi-abstract pattern of arabesques, to the detailing of the wall paneling and the pattern of the lace curtains, Caillebotte picks out the subtle signs of luxury and refinement within this deeply familiar environment. In the far corner of the room, a large wooden sideboard sits flush against the wall, its shelves containing a carefully curated display of porcelain and silverware.
Caillebotte’s interiors show his fascination with objects and textures: the patterns of the upholstery, the grids created by wall paneling, and the reflective surfaces of a table or piano top.Gloria Groom
As curator Gloria Groom has noted, for Caillebotte the family home “was a symbol of his heritage—that of the industrious, entrepreneurial, pious, and conservative grande bourgeoisie” (“Interiors and Portraits” in A. Distel, et. al., Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist, exh. cat., The Art Institute of Chicago, 1994, p. 180). Three empty chairs have been pushed away from the table and placed directly in front of the windows, perhaps symbolizing the family members missing from the lunch hour gathering—the artist’s older half-brother Alfred, his youngest brother, Martial, and the patriarch of the family, who had passed away in 1874.
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Le Déjeuner is Caillebotte’s daring treatment of space within the scene, particularly the extreme, oblique perspective of the table. Described in family inventories as a “large round table on a single pedestal leg,” one contemporary commentator noted that it appeared “twelve meters long” in the painting (quoted in ibid., p. 194). To achieve this effect, Caillebotte stretches its surface area, depicting the edge of the table in a grand, sweeping curve that dominates the room, creating a strange, telescopic distortion of the space. The oversized nature of the table accentuates the feeling of distance, both physical and psychological, between the different protagonists, perhaps providing a glimpse into the familial tensions at play behind the scenes of this seemingly proper and mundane event. In this way, Le Déjeuner is a family portrait laden with hidden depth and meaning, providing an intimate insight into the internal dynamics of the Caillebotte family at this particular moment in time.
Caillebotte chose to include Le Déjeuner in the Second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876, his first foray into the activities of the revolutionary group. Several commentators remarked upon the artist’s participation, singling him out as a mature painter of great promise and a bold new voice within the movement. Marius Chaumelin, for example, proclaimed: “Caillebotte is one of the most original painters to have come forward in some time, and I am not afraid I shall compromise myself by predicting that he will be famous before long” (quoted in C.S. Moffett, ed., The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874-1886, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1986, p. 167). The present painting was in fact one of four works on the theme of the luncheon to appear in the show—Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Berthe Morisot also exhibited paintings depicting the subject that year. While the other three focused on the effervescent play of light and atmosphere of an exterior, plein-air setting, Caillebotte’s painting transports the viewer into the very heart of the private world of the artist.
Caillebotte’s scenes of contemporary life proved pivotal in shaping the public reception of Impressionism during its early years, most notably for their importance to the writings of Edmond Duranty. Duranty was among the first critics to salute the Impressionist movement—his seminal essay, La nouvelle peinture: A propos du groupe d’artistes qui expose dans les Galeries Durand-Ruel, a thirty-eight page pamphlet written in response to the 1876 exhibition, was the first substantial publication written on the subject of impressionism. In its pages, Duranty celebrated the style, technique and novel subjects of these revolutionary painters, and in particular the unique brand of naturalism found in the work of Caillebotte and Degas, which he believed removed “the partition separating the studio from everyday life…” (La nouvelle peinture, reproduced in L. Nochlin, ed., Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 1874-1904: Sources and Documents, New Jersey, 1966, p. 5).
Reading through the essay, there are clear indications that Duranty was formulating his theories with Caillebotte’s paintings in mind. At home, Duranty writes, “the individual will be at a piano… He will be having lunch with his family or sitting in his armchair near his worktable, absorbed in thought…” (quoted in Impressionist Interiors, exh. cat., The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 2008, p. 33). Similarly, his discussion of the importance of shifting viewpoints appears to correspond directly to works such as Le Déjeuner: “Views of people and things have a thousand ways of being unexpected in reality. Our point of view is not always in the center of a room with two lateral walls receding towards that of the rear; it does not always gather together along these lines and angles of cornices with a mathematical regularity and symmetry… [One’s viewpoint] is sometimes very high, sometimes very low, missing the ceiling, getting at objects from their undersides, unexpectedly cutting off the furniture…” (op. cit., 1966, p. 6).
While Caillebotte’s painterly interests soon moved outside to the streets of Paris, depicting the play of life within the modern cityscape, his intricately detailed and psychologically nuanced interior paintings would have an important impact on a generation of younger artists through the ensuing decades. The pointillist, Paul Signac, for example, who was a close friend of Caillebotte’s, appears to directly invoke Le Déjeuner in the compositional structure and play of reflections in his painting La salle à manger, Opus 152 (1886-1887; Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo). Similarly, the artists of the Nabis movement, including Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, would repeatedly explore the intimate interiors of their friends and acquaintances, blending the traditions of portraiture and genre painting in their compositions, with a particular emphasis on the interactions of various family members around a table, as they ate together throughout the day.