Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World

Gustave Caillebotte is probably the least known of the Impressionists circle due to his short life, and the fact that his paintings remained for years in his brother’s collection. Although his gift to the French state in 1894 was the foundation of today’s Musée d’Orsay, Caillebotte’s revolutionary ideas about depicting modern life subjects, his altogether groundbreaking paintings of men at work, play, and even toweling off after a bath, continue to appeal and surprise. This presentation will draw from the research and loans of the upcoming exhibition Gustave Caillebotte: Painting his World, and take a closer look at who this artist was, his achievements during his lifetime, and why his adjacent but very much oppositional relationship to the Impressionists’ subjects and techniques, still matters today.

*Entrée Libre: free entry for students with ID

About Gloria Groom

An internationally acclaimed scholar and author on 19th Century French painting Gloria Groom is currently Chair of Painting and Sculpture of Europe, and the David and Mary Winton Green Curator at The Art Institute of Chicago. A native of Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, and from the museology program at the Ecole du Louvre, Paris, Dr. Groom joined the Art Institute in 1985. Since then, she has been involved in major monographic exhibitions and catalogues including Gauguin, Odilon Redon, Caillebotte, Renoir, Manet, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, and thematic exhibitions, such as Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity (2012-2013), Van Gogh’s Bedrooms (2016) and Gauguin: Artist as Alchemist (2017) Manet and Modern Beauty (2019 Cezanne in collaboration with Tate Modern and her current exhibition Gustave Caillebotte: Painting his World which opens at the Art Institute in late June 2025.

Dr. Groom led the creation of monographic online scholarly catalogs for the Impressionist collection (including Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Caillebotte, Gauguin, Manet, and Cezanne). In recognition of her contributions to French art and culture, she was awarded the Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Republic in 2007 and promoted to Officier in 2010. In 2016, she received the title of Chevalier in the Légion d’honneur.