OIL PAINTING: The House Painters, 1877
Caillebotte aimed to paint reality as it existed and as he saw it, hoping to reduce painting's inherent theatricality. He also shared the Impressionists' committment to optical truth. Caillebotte painted many domestic, familial scenes, interiors, and figures in a landscape at Yerres, but he is most well known for his paintings of urban Paris, such as The Floor Scrapers, 1875, Le pont de l'Europe, 1876, and Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877. These paintings were quite controversial for their banal and often lower-class subjects, and for their exaggerated, plunging perspective. The tilted ground common to these paintings is very characteristic of Caillebotte's work, which may have been strongly influenced by Japanese prints and the new technology of photography. Cropping and "zooming in," techniques which are also commonly found in Caillebotte's oeuvre, may also be the result of his interest in photography. A large number of Caillebotte's paintingsalso employ a very high vantage point, including his many balcony paintings such as The Man on the Balcony and A Young Man at His Window.
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