Snow-covered roofs

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Painting “Snowy Roofs” by Gustave Caillebotte
Snow-covered roofs
Gustave Caillebotte , 1878/79
64.5 cm × 81 cm
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay , Paris

Snow-covered roofs , also a view over roofs in snow ( French Vue de toits (Effet de neige) or Toits sous la neige ), is a painting by the French painter Gustave Caillebotte that was created in the winter of 1878/79 . The 64.5 cm × 81 cm picture, painted in oil on canvas, is part of a series of six paintings which - unlike the pictures previously painted by the artist - do not show the strictly geometrically structured Grands Boulevards , but a view of disordered roofs and Backyards in the districts of Paris that have remained untouched by modernization .

Models for such wintery motifs in the Impressionist style can be found in the works of his painter friends Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro , who had dealt with them years before. Caillebotte painted the picture, created in the Paris district of Montmartre , just a few weeks after his mother's death. Perhaps death was the cause of the gloomy mood. The picture came to the art collection of the French state as a gift from his brother Martial Caillebotte in 1894 and has been on display at the Musée d'Orsay since 1986 .

Image description

The painting shows a view over the snow-covered roofs of Paris from an elevated position. In the foreground of the picture there is a house at a slight angle to the viewer, which is cut from the left and lower edge of the picture. As a result, only a small part of the house wall can be seen next to the top floor with its attic windows. Directly behind it is another house, of which a dark house wall can be seen next to the roof, pointing to the right edge of the picture. Between these two houses and the right edge of the picture, the view falls into a back courtyard. In the background of the picture further houses extend from the left to the right edge of the picture. Their roofs, walls, facades, gables and dormers can be recognized . Trees without leaves are placed between the houses, some of which also have snow on their branches. The gray sky is painted as a narrow strip at the top of the picture. Neither a street nor a prominent point allow precise location in this deserted cityscape.

Caillebotte painted an abundance of details in this cityscape. The numerous chimneys in their different shapes, colors and materials are striking. The variants built in red bricks, some of which have short tubular attachments, alternate with gray chimneys on which there are tall metal tube attachments, some of which are crowned with chimney hoods. Mansard roofs, gable roofs and pent roofs vary in different materials. In addition to the roof coverings with zinc sheet, the houses in the foreground also have examples with roof tiles, such as the house with the reddish facade in the background. The windows of the house in the foreground are also shown in great detail, where the individual bars of the external blinds as well as the ornamented lambrequins can be seen.

For the art historian Karin Sagner, “a dreary, almost gloomy poetry prevails in this picture.” Caillebotte created the gloomy atmosphere of the picture not with darker tones, but with many different colors. In addition to the dominant white of the snow on the roofs and other surfaces, he used, for example, a palette of dark purple, blue-gray and variations of green for the various gray tones as well as graduated ocher and red tones. A diffuse light prevents almost any shadow effect . Also, no light source shines out of the windows, which are always closed, and which do not allow a view into the interior of the houses. The painting style of the picture shows the typical handwriting of Impressionism. In the area of ​​the snow-covered house in the foreground, broad brushstrokes and dabs of broad brushstrokes can be seen, while the trees show finer lines. The picture is signed, but not dated, G. Caillebotte lower left in the area of ​​the dark chimneys in a row .

Background to the creation of the picture

Caillebotte was one of the younger members of the Impressionist group. While his painting colleagues Degas , Monet and Renoir exhibited their works as early as the 1860s, it was not until the beginning of the 1870s that he began to turn to painting. Initially, he often chose interiors as motifs in which a view out of the window is already part of the picture. Examples of this are the paintings Young Man at the Piano , Billiards or Young Man at the Window , on which he worked around 1876. In addition, Caillebotte dedicated at this time the river Yerres of plein air painting and worked on his large Parisian cityscapes as Pont de l'Europe (1876) and street in Paris on a rainy day (1877). These pictures show - unlike snow-covered roofs with its rear building perspective - modern Paris with its new streets, squares and houses.

After two motifs with Place St.-Augustin painted in the summer of 1878, which, like the aforementioned paintings, depict a view of the city at street level, Caillebotte switched to the view of the viewer from the window of an upper one with the views of Rue Halévy created in the same year Floor to steer down into the street. In addition, Caillebotte shows a view of the roofs of Paris for the first time in the pictures of Rue Halévy. Just like in the painting Snowy Roofs , the roofs of these pictures are executed in great detail. You can see zinc-covered roofs, attic windows and chimneys. In contrast to Snowy Roofs , the pictures of Rue Halévy have a distinctive point of orientation: the dome on the right edge of the picture and the figurative roof attachment clearly show the building of the Opéra Garnier and enable a precise localization of the position of Caillebotte.

The Paris of the Grands Boulevards was a familiar environment for Caillebotte, who came from a wealthy family. The Paris-born artist lived from 1868 to 1878 in his parents' house in the vicinity of the Saint-Lazare train station , a new building erected on Rue de Miromesnil during the redevelopment of the city by Georges-Eugène Haussmann . The Boulevard Haussmann is known as his address from 1879 . The reason for this move was possibly the death of Caillebotte's mother, who died on October 20, 1878 at the age of 58. The art historian Kirk Varnedoe suspects a connection between the death of his mother and the turn to a series of melancholy roofscapes in the autumn and winter of 1878/79, which also includes the picture Snowy Roofs . In these pictures, Caillebotte did not focus on the modern front of the city with its newly built boulevards, but rather the view of the disordered and hidden backyards and roofs of old Paris.

  • Gustave Caillebotte:
    Young Man at the Window , 1876,
    example of the connection between interior painting and the view from the window

  • Gustave Caillebotte:
    Rue Halévy, view from the sixth floor , 1878,
    one of the artist's first pictures with a view of the roofscape of Paris

  • Gustave Caillebotte: Snow-Covered Roofs , Paris , 1878, Preparatory Sketch for Snow-Covered Roofs

  • Gustave Caillebotte: Boulevard Haussmann im Schnee , 1880–81, the artist's view from his own apartment

From his own apartment, however, Caillebotte was unable to have this view, as the buildings in the area were the same height as the house in which he lived. Of the six pictures in the series of roof landscapes, the exact position of the painter is known only in one picture. The painting Vue de Toits, Paris was created in the roof studio of the artist Édouard Dessommes , who was a friend of Caillebotte's , which was located in the Rue de Clichy in Montmartre. This work shows the gray backyard roofs still without snow and is the only picture in this series with the date 1878. It has been handed down from Caillebotte's brother Martial that snow-covered roofs were also built in the Montmartre district, but without specifying a precise location of the view. It was only around 1880 that he created pictures with the view from his apartment on Boulevard Haussmann, including winter motifs.

The winter of 1878/79 was exceptionally cold in Paris. As of December 19, the Île-de-France weather records show unusually heavy snowfalls. This cold spell lasted until January 1, 1879, when it began to rain. From January 6th to 23rd, icy temperatures are again reported, but no precipitation is known. Brief sleet is only recorded for January 15 and 16. Based on these weather records, the creation of the painting Snowy Roofs can be determined from December 19, 1878. It is not known whether the painter completed the painting in December 1878 or continued working on it in 1879 before presenting the picture to the public in April of that year in the fourth group exhibition of the Impressionists. Another picture with a snowy roofscape is Snowy Roofs, Paris , which may have been a preparatory work for Snowy Roofs . The painting, which is slightly smaller at 60 × 72.4 cm, is dated by art historians to 1878. This view, painted on cardboard, is more sketchy with coarser brushstrokes than snow-covered roofs and was never publicly exhibited during Caillebotte's lifetime.

Possible role models

Winter scenes have a long tradition in European painting and can be found in the Renaissance by Pieter Bruegel the Elder , whose works such as The Bethlehemite Child Murder show a row of snow-covered roofs. Some of the French impressionists - better known for summer motifs in the sunshine - have also devoted themselves to the subject of winter landscapes since the 1860s. For example, Claude Monet , with whom Caillebotte had been friends since the mid-1870s and whom he regularly supported financially, already showed winter scenes in his early work that were created in Honfleur or Étretat and also depict snow-covered houses. In these pictures he tried to reproduce the atmosphere of the snow-covered landscape with its special light effects and was not only able to fall back on French models such as Gustave Courbet , but also oriented himself on Japanese woodcuts by artists such as Utagawa Hiroshige and Utagawa Kuniyoshi . The influence of Japanese artists can also be seen in Caillebotte's work and is particularly evident in the painting Snowy Roofs from the unorthodox perspective. In the winter of 1878/79 Monet also painted views of snow landscapes again. Caillebotte acquired his painting Effet de neige à Vétheuil in 1879 for his own art collection.

The art historian Eliza E. Rathbone sees a clear relationship between Caillebotte's painting Snowy Roofs and the painting Winter by Camille Pissarro from 1872. This work, part of a series with the motifs of the four seasons, adorned the house of the businessman Achille Arosa, where it Caillebotte may have seen it. Six years before Caillebotte, Pissarro showed the snow-covered houses of Pontoise , which are integrated into a rural setting, but show the motif of the roof landscape in a similar way. Before Caillebotte, the German artist Adolph Menzel already devoted himself to the motif of the backyards and roofs of a city in the mid-1840s . Such a motif in winter is shown in the picture Berliner Hinterhäuser im Schnee from 1847, which Caillebotte was probably not aware of. However, influences on Caillebotte could have come from photographers. Early views of Parisian courtyards and roofs are particularly well known in the work of Hippolyte Bayard .

  • Camille Pissarro:
    Winter , 1872

  • Claude Monet:
    Effet de neige à Vétheuil , 1878/79

  • Adolph Menzel:
    Berlin back houses in the snow , 1847

Contemporary criticism - the fourth group exhibition of the Impressionists

simple drawing by Draner showing roofs
Draner: Caricature on Caillebotte's roof landscapes from April 23, 1879 in the magazine Le Charivari . The drawing does not refer directly to snow-covered roofs , but to another work by the artist.

Caillebotte showed Snow-Covered Roofs together with a further 24 paintings in the fourth group exhibition of the Impressionists, which took place in Paris from April 10 to May 11, 1879. In contrast to the earlier exhibitions, this time his work received an overall more positive response, although the large number of works he exhibited caused criticism. The art critic Edmond Duranty, who was rather sympathetic to the Impressionists, dealt with Caillebotte's pictorial subjects and noted that the artist cultivated his tendency towards the dark. While most of the critics did not go into the two roof landscapes shown, Arsène Houssaye emphasized the simple and powerful painting style recognizable in these pictures.

In addition, caricaturists made some drawings based on Caillebotte's pictures. An artist working under the pseudonym Bec dedicated a double page in the magazine Le monde parisien to the works of Caillebotte shown in the exhibition, on which he humorously traced various pictures and provided them with sharp comments, but without going into the two roof views. The Belgian caricaturist Draner , who devoted a page in the magazine Le Charivari to Caillebotte's exhibition contributions , also made a mockery of the snowless painting Vue de Toits, Paris . Alluding to the zinc roofs that occupy the large areas of the picture, he subtitled his drawing “ Zinguerie sentimentale pleine de poèsie ” (meaning: “Sentimental zinc hut full of poetry”) and added the comment “ Inspirée de l'Assommoir ”. "Inspired by l'Assommoir" is an allusion to the 1877 novel L'Assommoir by Émile Zola , in which a main character is the zinc worker Coupeau.

Provenance

When Gustave Caillebotte showed the painting in the fourth group exhibition of the Impressionists in spring 1879, it was marked Collection MK . Who is behind these initials is unknown and art historians such as Marie Berhaut , the author of Caillebotte's catalog raisonné, suspect that the artist himself was the owner at the time and specified a different owner. The picture was in his estate when Caillebotte died in 1894, and in the same year his brother Martial Caillebotte gave it to the French state as a étude de paysage (landscape study) . It entered the Louvre collection together with Caillebotte's painting The Parquet Grinder and was exhibited in the Musée du Luxembourg from 1896 to 1929 . After it was in the Louvre until 1947, it then belonged to the collection of the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume . It has been part of the permanent exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay since 1986.

literature

  • Kirk Varnedoe : Gustave Caillebotte . Yale University Press, New Haven 1987, ISBN 0-300-08279-7 .
  • Marie Berhaut : Gustave Caillebotte. Catalog raisonné des peintures et pastels . Wildenstein Institute, Paris 1994, ISBN 2-908063-09-3 .
  • Anne Distel: Gustave Caillebotte: Urban impressionist . Abbeville Press, New York 1995, ISBN 0-7892-0041-4 .
  • Charles S. Moffett: Impressionists in Winter. Effets de neige . Phillips Collection and Philip Wilson, Washington, DC and London 1998, ISBN 0-85667-495-8 .
  • Juliane Cosandier: Caillebotte. Au cœur de l'impressionisme . Fondation de l'Hermitage, Lausanne 2005, ISBN 2-88453-123-8 .
  • Karin Sagner: Gustave Caillebotte. New perspectives on impressionism . Hirmer, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-7774-2161-2 .
  • Hartwig Fischer : Pictures of a metropolis. The impressionists in Paris . Edition Folkwang and Steidl, Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-86930-183-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Under the title Snow-covered roofs shown in the Essen exhibition Pictures of a Metropolis , Museum Folkwang 2010, see catalog Fischer: Pictures of a Metropolis , p. 302. Karin Sagner uses the title View over roofs in snow in Sagner: Gustave Caillebotte , p. 37 In Marie Berhaut's catalog raisonné, the title of the picture is given as Toits sous la neige , see Berhaut: Gustave Caillebotte , p. 108. Vue de toits (Effet de neige) can be found on the website of the Musée d'Orsay.
  2. ↑ a b Kirk Varnedoe: Gustave Caillebotte , p. 116.
  3. ↑ a b c Sagner: Gustave Caillebotte , p. 37.
  4. ↑ a b Moffett: Impressionists in Winter , p. 218.
  5. ↑ Caillebotte was born in 1848, Degas was born in 1834, Monet in 1840 and Renoir in 1841.
  6. ↑ Eliza E. Rathbone in Moffett: Impressionists in Winter . P. 192
  7. ↑ La Place St.-Augustin, temps brumeux and La Caserne de la Pepinière , both 1878, private collection, see Varnedoe: Gustave Caillebotte , pages 110–113.
  8. ↑ La Rue Halévy, vue d'un balcon and Rue Halévy, vue d'un sixième étage , both 1878, private collection, see Anne Distel: Gustave Caillebotte . Pp. 154-157.
  9. ↑ From 1866 to 1878 the Caillebotte family lived in a new building built for them at 77 rue de Miromesnil at the corner of 13 rue de Lisbonne. Their mother died on October 20, 1878. Gustave Caillebotte first exhibited at the fourth Impressionist exhibition April 1879 as his residence at Boulevard Haussmann No. 31, where he lived with his brother Martial. The exact moving date is not known. See the biographical information in Anne Distel: Gustave Caillebotte . Pp. 311-314.
  10. ^ Anne Distel: Gustave Caillebotte . P. 314
  11. ↑ Cosandier: Caillebotte , pp. 29-30.
  12. ↑ James H. Rubin in Fischer: Bilder einer Metropole , p. 78
  13. ↑ Catalog raisonné No. 95 in Berhaut: Gustave Caillebotte
  14. ↑ a b c Moffett: Impressionists in Winter , p. 192.
  15. ^ Moffett: Impressionists in Winter , p. 196.
  16. ^ E. Renou: Annuaire de la Société Météorologique de France Volume 28, 1880 pp. 260-262, cited in Moffett: Impressionists in Winter , pp. 225-227.
  17. ↑ a b Moffett: Impressionists in Winter, p. 194.
  18. ^ Moffett: Impressionists in Winter , p. 219.
  19. ↑ Moffett: Impressionists in Winter , pp. 80–85.
  20. ↑ Such Japanese woodcuts from the possession of Claude Monet are now in his former house in Gerverny. See Moffett: Impressionists in Winter , pp. 26-29.
  21. ^ Distel: Gustave Caillebotte , p. 329.
  22. ↑ Reference to Menzel by Distel: Gustave Caillebotte , p. 153.
  23. ^ For example, the photograph of the rear view of the Rue de l'Eglise à Quartier Batignolles from around 1840 , reproduced in Distel: Gustave Caillebotte , p. 153.
  24. ↑ The catalog for the exhibition lists 24 works by Caillebotte, not including the picture Une vache et son veau , which is also shown there . Thistle: Caillebotte , p. 314.
  25. ↑ Cosandier: Caillebotte , pp. 29-30.
  26. ↑ Reviews have appeared from, among others, Louis Besson in L'Evénement , Louis Leroy in Beaux-Arts , Jules Poignard Montjoyeux in Le Gaulois , Diego Martelli in Roma Artistica and Bertall in L'Artiste . See Varnedoe: Gustave Caillebotte , pp. 192–193.
  27. ↑ Edmond Duranty: La Quatrième Exposition faite par un groupe d'artistes indépendants in La Chronique des arts et de la curiosité of April 19, 1879. Quoted in Distel: Caillebotte , p. 153
  28. ^ Arsène Houssaye under the pseudonym FC de Syène: Salon de 1879 in L'Artiste, Distel: Caillebotte , p. 153.
  29. ↑ Published under the title Coup d'œil sur les indépendants , published on May 17, 1879 in Le monde parisien . Illustration of the drawings for example in Cosandier: Caillebotte , page 89.
  30. ↑ Published under the title CHEZ MM. LES PEINTRES INDÉPENDANTS, PAR DRANER on April 23, 1879 in Le Charivari. Illustration in thistle: Caillebotte , p. 184.
  31. ^ Berhaut: Gustave Caillebotte , p. 108.
This article was added to the list of excellent articles on January 25, 2011 in this version .