French painter and arts patron Gustave Caillebotte was BOTD in 1848. Born in Paris to a wealthy mercantile family, he was educated at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Vanves, graduating with a law degree in 1869. The following year, he was conscripted into the French Army and fought in the Franco-Prussian War. While the war was a humiliating defeat for France, it helped bolster the Caillebotte family fortunes, as the official supplier of blankets to the French Army, allowing Gustave to pursue a career as a painter. After being demobilised, he began studying painting, meeting Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Marcellin Desboutin, Pierre-August Renoir and other key figures of the emerging Impressionist movement. Unlike them, Caillebotte painted in a strictly realist style, though chose everyday scenes of urban and working life, typically featuring attractive working-class men. In 1875, his painting Les Raboteurs de parquet (The Floor Planers) was rejected from the Paris Salon, with jurors expressing their shock at the image’s vulgarity (though apparently oblivious to the homoerotic charge of his shirtless, muscular planers). Undeterred, he presented The Floor Planers and other paintings at the Second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876, alongside Degas, Desboutin, Monet, Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley and Berthe Morisot. He helped fund and promote the Impressionists’ subsequent exhibitions in 1877, 1879, 1880 and 1882, thus ensuring that his own paintings were included, though they attracted relatively less attention than his colleagues. While he continued painting, he became better known as a financier and patron, frequently lending artists money, paying the rent on their studio space and purchasing their works at inflated prices. He shared (and underwrote) a studio with Renoir for some years, who returned the favour by including Caillebotte in his celebrated 1881 painting Le Déjeuner des canotiers (Luncheon of the Boating Party). Largely disregarded in his own country, his work fared better in the United States, and was included in early touring exhibitions of Impressionist art. He retired to his riverside property near Argenteuil in 1888, devoting himself to growing orchids and building and racing yachts. He died in 1894, aged 45, and was buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. In his will, he bequeathed his collection of paintings by Renoir, Degas, Monet, Cézanne, Manet, Pissarro and Millet to the French state, which eventually became the core of the Impressionist collection at the Musée d’Orsay. His own work was largely forgotten until the 1950s, when his family began selling his paintings. In 1964, the Chicago Art Institute purchased one of his urban scenes, Rue de Paris, temps de pluie (Paris Street, Rainy Day). It has since become one of the gallery’s most popular exhibits, featuring prominently in the 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Biographers and art historians have speculated that Caillebotte may have been bisexual, pointing to his robust painterly appreciation for the male body. In 2024, the Musée d’Orsay mounted a major retrospective of Caillebotte’s work, entitled Painting Men, prompting outrage from several (heterosexual male) art critics for insinuating that he was gay.