Lot Essay
Gustave Caillebotte painted Nature morte aux huîtres in 1881, during a period when he focussed intensely on the still life as a subject. The picture entered the collection of Caillebotte's brother Martial and was exhibited in the artist's posthumous retrospective in 1894 before being acquired by the legendary dealer Ambroise Vollard. The work shows a single place setting at a small table, with a bottle of wine, a folded napkin, lemons and oysters, which had become an expensive delicacy due to overfishing, already served. The table is viewed from the other side, from a raised perspective, with the viewer placed in the position of some passer-by, perhaps even the waiter. Meanwhile, the artist's signature is placed by the chair, implying that the seat may subsequently be occupied by Caillebotte himself. In his analysis of this painting, Douglas W. Druick suggested that this ambiguity, 'can be seen as alluding to [Caillebotte's] dualism as artist-worker and bourgeois collector within the economy of the Impressionist enterprise. Once again he embodied the oppositional dynamic that is at the heart of his most original contributions to the painting of modern life' (D.W. Druick, 'Caillebotte's Still Lifes' in Gustave Caillebotte and the Fashioning of Identity in Impressionist Paris, New Brunswick, 2002, pp. 205-07).
Of the various artists associated with Impressionism, only Paul Cézanne made the still life a major part of his pictorial explorations of reality. Nevertheless, it provided Caillebotte with a crucial forum for pictorial experimentation, hence Druick's statement that, 'Caillebotte's occasional engagements with the subject of still life in the late 1870s and early 1880s produced some of the most provocatively original compositions within his oeuvre' (ibid, p. 197). Caillebotte explored the theme on several occasions throughout his career, especially in two significant still life campaigns: the first in 1881-82 when Nature morte aux huîtres was painted, the second in his flower pictures of the early 1890s. The still life, which before moving to moving to Petit Gennevilliers he often infused with an urban twist, allowed him to explore innovative compositions, as is demonstrated in this view of a place setting from the 'wrong' side of the table. These compositions were in part based on his experiments with and observations of photography, resulting in their appearing as snap-shots, vignettes of everyday life in Paris, in this case perhaps in a brasserie; the artist's combination of subject matter and composition in Nature morte aux huîtres, lends it a vivid immediacy, using techniques similar to his celebrated 1879 picture, Le déjeuner, which also treated the subject of food and the consumer. Its realism and honesty appear to place it at a distance from the overly-composed still life paintings of oysters of the Dutch Old Masters or even from Manet's sensual and glamorous Huîtres et champagne painted only a few years earlier, revealing Caillebotte bringing his own unique vision to the subject, discarding all precedents and achieving a singularly modern vision, a glimpse of life from the point of view of the Parisian flâneur so celebrated by Charles Baudelaire.
It is not only a striking portrait of everyday life of modern Paris, but a portrait of the artist's life as well. The new personalisation of still life, using props from the artist's domestic environment (pipes, newspapers and playing cards) was later championed by Braque, Picasso and Matisse, whose use of such everyday objects was crucial to the experiments of the early 20th Century avant-gardes.
Of the various artists associated with Impressionism, only Paul Cézanne made the still life a major part of his pictorial explorations of reality. Nevertheless, it provided Caillebotte with a crucial forum for pictorial experimentation, hence Druick's statement that, 'Caillebotte's occasional engagements with the subject of still life in the late 1870s and early 1880s produced some of the most provocatively original compositions within his oeuvre' (ibid, p. 197). Caillebotte explored the theme on several occasions throughout his career, especially in two significant still life campaigns: the first in 1881-82 when Nature morte aux huîtres was painted, the second in his flower pictures of the early 1890s. The still life, which before moving to moving to Petit Gennevilliers he often infused with an urban twist, allowed him to explore innovative compositions, as is demonstrated in this view of a place setting from the 'wrong' side of the table. These compositions were in part based on his experiments with and observations of photography, resulting in their appearing as snap-shots, vignettes of everyday life in Paris, in this case perhaps in a brasserie; the artist's combination of subject matter and composition in Nature morte aux huîtres, lends it a vivid immediacy, using techniques similar to his celebrated 1879 picture, Le déjeuner, which also treated the subject of food and the consumer. Its realism and honesty appear to place it at a distance from the overly-composed still life paintings of oysters of the Dutch Old Masters or even from Manet's sensual and glamorous Huîtres et champagne painted only a few years earlier, revealing Caillebotte bringing his own unique vision to the subject, discarding all precedents and achieving a singularly modern vision, a glimpse of life from the point of view of the Parisian flâneur so celebrated by Charles Baudelaire.
It is not only a striking portrait of everyday life of modern Paris, but a portrait of the artist's life as well. The new personalisation of still life, using props from the artist's domestic environment (pipes, newspapers and playing cards) was later championed by Braque, Picasso and Matisse, whose use of such everyday objects was crucial to the experiments of the early 20th Century avant-gardes.