Caillebotte, Gustave (1848-1894)
Portrait de Madame Anne-Marie Hagen
1879
Oil on canvas, 71.1 x 55.2 cm
Private collection
Born into a wealthy Normandy family, Gustave Caillebotte was at the centre of the Impressionist movement, exhibiting with the group from 1876 to 1882. He inherited a fortune from his father in 1874 and had no need to sell his paintings but was a generous benefactor to his fellow artists. Caillebotte amassed a superb collection of Impressionist works which he bequeathed to the French nation in 1894; today they form the core Impressionist collection of the Musée d’Orsay. Because he had no need of promotion by a dealer, many of Caillebotte’s own paintings remained in the collection of his family and friends. It was not until the 1970s that his work attracted serious scholarly attention and he was revealed as one of the most innovative and original of the Impressionist painters. His output was relatively modest compared with some of his contemporaries – he died aged just forty-six – and his financial independence enabled him to choose more radical subjects than some of his contemporaries.
The uncluttered, flickering background and subtly modulated tones of cool purple, blue and rose in the present portrait emphasise the sitter’s elegance; serenely depicted here is Caillebotte’s companion Anne-Marie Hagen. She appears in a number of his paintings, most famously in Le Pont de l’Europe, 1876 (Musée du Petit Palais, Geneva). Presented as an élégante walking across the bridge towards the viewer, she has just been overtaken by a dandy, the artist himself, who cannot help turning his head to catch another glimpse of her beauty. The painter leaves uncertain whether the two are together, or whether the man is admiring a stranger. Does she walk on her own because Caillebotte wants the central figure to be perceived as the archetypal, independent flâneur, or because he is making a subtle reference to the secrecy of their relationship? Anne-Marie’s status in the painter’s life was similarly ambiguous – Caillebotte’s haut-bourgeois family disapproved of his having a mistress and upon learning of her existence his sister-in-law refused to see the couple. Nonetheless, Anne-Marie populated Caillebotte’s canvases during their near decade-long relationship. She appears, exquisitely dressed in a winter costume in Caillebotte’s Portrait de jeune femme dans un intérieur. She holds a fan in the unfinished oil Portrait de jeune femme (private collection) and conceals her face with her arm in Caillebotte’s Nu au divan (Minneapolis Institute of Fine Arts). Her kind brown eyes, creamy skin and delicate hands are adorned only by discreet jewellery and she wears a sober, well-cut dress. Simplicity, stillness, intelligence and affection inform the portrait and, completely relaxed, Anne-Marie gazes trustingly at the artist with an easy intimacy. If she bore the label of ‘kept woman’, Caillebotte refused to portray Anne-Marie as a Nana figure, and showed his companion not as a sensual object, but as an observant and dignified woman. Caillebotte was involved with Anne-Marie from sometime around 1876 until 1884, the date of his last known portrait of her: La femme à la rose, 1884 (formerly Robert Orchard Collection) shows an older Anne-Marie against a plain background, in a dark dress which contrasts with the vivid burgundy rose at her throat. Though it has been argued by some art historians that Anne-Marie was in fact the same person as another character in Caillebotte’s life, Charlotte Berthier, contending that the latter was simply a pseudonym of Anne-Marie Hagen’s, it is almost certain that the two women were simply both lovers of the painter: Anne-Marie from c. 1876 – c 1884, and Charlotte from a date prior to 1883 until the painter’s death. Charlotte Berthier can be firmly identified as the young woman painted by Renoir in 1883 (now in the National Gallery, Washington) and in a will Caillebotte drafted that same year he left Charlotte Berthier a FFr. 12,000 annuity. Renoir’s Charlotte Berthier is indisputably of a different physical appearance to Anne-Marie as she appears in Caillebotte’s 1884 La femme à la rose. Caillebotte himself was modest and generous; a critic wrote of him in 1882 that he ‘lives very quietly, detests compliments, asks only to defend his school, and would never want to carry off a victory.’ In 1887, Caillebotte moved permanently with Charlotte Berthier to the house that he had bought at Petit Gennevilliers in 1880 and that he left to Charlotte in a codicil to his will in 1889. There they lived in a flower-filled domestic paradise that Caillebotte often painted in these years. Roses in the garden at Petit Gennevilliers, c.1881–83 (private collection), shows its well-ordered beauty; whether the woman tending roses in the painting is Anne-Marie Hagen or Charlotte Berthier we may never know. (Stair Sainty)
See also:
• Hagen, Anne Marie (1858-?)