Sale 1229, Lot 3
Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894)
Gâteaux, 1881
Oil on canvas
Estimate: $800,000-1,200,000


Wide tree-lined avenues transformed the crowded city centre of Paris in the mid-19th century. City life revolved around the boulevards whose archetypal inhabitant was the flâneur, or dandy, for whom, as Baudelaire observed, 'the street becomes a dwelling… news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of his cafés are the balconies from which he looks down'.
Caillebotte was Impressionism's key artiste-flâneur. Through daring compositions such as La rue Halévy, vue d'un balcon, and Gâteaux, Caillebotte celebrated the new bustle of city life with its boulevards and shop windows.

Caillebotte's focus on urban themes intensified after 1879 when he moved from his family home to a sixth-floor apartment on boulevard Haussmann. He recorded its magnificent views, as in La rue Halévy, with the dome of the Garnier opera house visible.

As Laurence Madeline observed: 'In Haussmann's Paris, balconies were fashionable... Parisians could not only watch pedestrians on the street but be watched by them as well. The balcony became...a pictorial motif for the painters of modern life, a sort of observatory for the privileged.'

Caillebotte was intrigued by the plunging view of the rue Halévy, depicting it in two of his most celebrated canvases of the late 1870s. In both he greatly accentuated the perspective so that the street becomes the composition's central axis. He treated the precipitous recession of the street in a horizontal format, painting the recently erected buildings with characteristic precision.

The rise of the grands magasins during the Second Empire was critical to the city's development. The new boulevards sought to rival these vast emporiums of consumption as 'caravansaries of fashion', sprouting sumptuously decorated shops to attract the passer-by.

Establishments such as the Patisserie Gloppe on the Champs Elysées also responded to the needs of this new audience of flâneurs. The introduction of clear plate-glass elided the spaces of shop and street, helping to turn the passer-by into a customer. Visual display became an art, the window dresser an artist who transformed goods into provocative still-lifes.

This modern Parisian spectacle is celebrated in Caillebotte's Les gâteaux, lavishly presented in a double row, as they might have been displayed. Part of a small series of still lives painted in 1881, it specifically addresses the new consumption of the bourgeoisie.

As seen in Fruits à l'étalage (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts), Les gâteaux offers the viewer the sights seen by the Parisian flâneur. Neither Les gâteaux and La rue Halévy, vue d'un Balcon has ever been offered at auction before.


Thomas Seydoux, Christie's Impressionist & Modern Art Department, Paris


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