New book casts light on link between Gustave Caillebotte’s painting and his stamp collecting
Gustave Caillebotte: Worker, Collector, Painter. By Samuel Raybone. 243 pages, 9 by 6 inches, 8 color and 46 b&w illustrations. Published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts, New York and London, 2020. ISBN: 978-1-5013-3994-3. Price $117 (hardback) and $93.60 (eBook) available via publisher. Also available to check out from the APRL, G6207 .C134g 2020.
Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) is best-known as an important late 19th-century French painter. Often grouped with the Impressionists, with whom he was closely associated as an artist, patron and art collector, his work also had much in common with the Realist and Naturalist schools. Many of Caillebotte’s paintings have been reproduced on stamps, mostly by various less-than-reputable issuing entities; nevertheless, attractive and well-produced French issues have depicted the paintings “Portrait in the Country” (“Portraits à la campagne”), “Roses” and his self-portrait (Figure 1).
An important new book by British art historian Samuel Raybone casts significant new light on the connections between Caillebotte’s philatelic activities and their wider contexts. Much more on the book in a moment, but first some background.
Somewhat unusually for an artist, Caillebotte was a rich man due to his family circumstances (his father had inherited a textile business supplying the army with blankets) and he had the financial resources to pursue other interests as well as painting. Many stamp collectors may not know that Caillebotte and his younger brother, Martial (an accomplished musician and photographer), were high-flying philatelists. During the decade from 1877 to 1887, the brothers jointly created a 50-volume collection that, according to the March 1894 edition of The London Philatelist had “never been equalled.”
Other leading philatelists of the time recognized the significance of not only the Caillebottes’ collecting prowess but also their scholarship and writing on stamps. The brothers collaborated with fellow French collectors, as well as members of the Royal Philatelic Society, London, including leading British collector Thomas Keay Tapling on plating the New South Wales “Sydney Views.” They also wrote an important article on the stamps of Mexico. The fact that the Caillebotte brothers’ names were subsequently inscribed along with other Fathers of Philately in the margins of the Roll of Distinguished Philatelists established by the British Philatelic Federation in 1920 underlined their distinction as collectors and students of stamps.
The Caillebottes’ collection was so important that when the brothers ceased their philatelic activities, it was purchased for the then-huge sum of £5,000 by the English dealers Pemberton, Wilson & Company with funding from Tapling. A large part of the Caillebottes’ collection was subsequently integrated into Tapling’s own albums.
The Caillebottes’ style of organizing and presenting their stamps – reflecting the systematic, detail-oriented French School approach to philately – impressed Tapling so much that he adopted it for his own collection. Following Tapling’s untimely death in 1891, his collection passed to the British Museum and ultimately to the British Library, where it is on public display. If you are ever in London you can drop in to the British Library and see for yourself this major 19th century collection for which Gustave and Martial Caillebotte laid the foundations.
This is a serious volume (more than a quarter of its 252 pages are taken up by references, notes and a bibliography) and it treats its subject matter with a distinctly theoretical approach, which non-academic readers may find heavy going in places.
Raybone’s arguments are complex, dense and detailed. At risk of oversimplifying, a key argument is that a series of family bereavements (and possibly, Raybone speculates, an encounter with revenue stamps in the course of settling estate matters) led Gustave and Martial to jointly take up stamp collecting as a “psychologically comforting” activity that helped to structure their daily lives. At the same time, collecting – alongside painting in Gustave’s case – was a form of labor that allowed the brothers to feel that even as millionaires they had socially acceptable roles to play as citizens of France’s Third Republic, where work was portrayed as a “universal moral duty,” according to the author.
From a philatelic perspective, the book’s most important claim is that Gustave Caillebotte’s stamp collecting made a profound impact on his approach to painting. According to Raybone, a “philatelic terrain” was integral to Caillebotte’s “painterly vision.” In the author’s view, stamp collecting is essentially about recovering the “lost seriality” of the matter that’s collected. Raybone argues that for a short period in 1877 Gustave’s painting not only drew from the stamp album elements of its “visual morphology” but also the processes of “meaning production” that underpinned them. “The build-up of visual meaning through the apparently serialised and iterative repetition of a single visual motif across a surface, grounded in an appeal to lost order which fixes the activity of the signifying chain, ossifying it into a particular constellation.”
The part of Raybone’s book likely to interest philatelic readers most is the fourth chapter, “Philatelic Impressionism.” Here, the author analyzes in some detail the socially ordering functions of the postal service, stamp design (notably the transition in 1876 to the Peace & Commerce stamps, also known as Type Sage for their designer, Jules-Auguste Sage) and stamp collecting in the Third Republic.
Raybone also applies his ideas about the influence of stamp collecting on Caillebotte’s painting to three specific works – “Le Pont de L’Europe,” “Rue de Paris; temps de pluie,” and “Les peintres en bâtiment” (Figure 2).
While Raybone’s book has many other important things to say about the diverse psychological, sociological and political influences on Caillebotte’s approach to painting, the author has done a great service by highlighting the philatelic dimension. In doing so, he has cast light on the origins and historical context of one of the great 19th century stamp collections. Anyone interested in the early years of stamp collecting is likely to be as intrigued as I was by this volume, and it is highly recommended to that specialized potential readership as well as all those philatelists interested in the wider ramifications and significance of their hobby.
References
Birch, Brian J. The Fathers of Philately Inscribed on the Roll of Distinguished Philatelists (London: The Royal Philatelic Society London, 2019): 67-72.
Raybone, Samuel. Gustave Caillebotte: Worker, Collector, Painter (New York and London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020).
“The Late M. Georges Caillebotte,” The London Philatelist 3, no. 27 (March 1894): 61-62.
The Author
Tim Huxley enjoys both general stamp collecting and specialized philately. His current enthusiasms are the stamps of Denmark, France, post-1945 Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania and Ottoman Turkey. He is also interested in the history of philately and of philatelic literature. A longstanding APS and APRL member, he is also a Life Member of the Royal Philatelic Society London and is a recent recruit to the U.S.-based France and Colonies Philatelic Society.