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Portrait de Monsieur R. signed and dated 'G. Caillebotte 1877' (lower left) oil on canvas 317/8 x 413/8in. (81 x 105cm.) Painted in 1877 PROVENANCE Monsieur R., Paris (the sitter), by whom acquired directly from the artist and thence by descent to the present owner. LITERATURE L. Leroy, 'Beaux-Arts', Le Charivari, 17 April 1879. Bec (pseud.), 'Coup d'oeil sur les ind‚pendants', Le Monde parisien, 17 May 1879 (caricature illustrated). Bertall (pseud.), 'Exposition des ind‚pendants: ex-impressionnistes, demain intentionistes', L'Artiste, 1 June 1879. M. Berhaut, Caillebotte, sa vie et son oeuvre, Catalogue raisonn‚ des peintures et pastels, Paris 1978, no. 86. M. Berhaut, Gustave Caillebotte, Catalogue raisonn‚ des peintures et pastels, Paris 1994, no. 60 (illustrated p. 95). EXHIBITION Paris, 4 e Exposition Impressionniste, 1879, no. 19. Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist, September 1994-January 1995, no. 74 (illustrated in the catalogue p. 198); this exhibition later travelled to The Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art. London, The Royal Academy of Arts, Gustave Caillebotte, the unknown Impressionist, March-June 1996, no. 23 (ilustrated in the catalogue p. 122). NOTES Preserved in a discreet private collection for over a century, Portrait de Monsieur R. was among the paintings Caillebotte showed at the Fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1879, in all likelihood lent to the show by the sitter for whom it had been executed in the preceding year. It has remained with his descendants until today. Indeed, until the inclusion of Portrait de Monsieur R. in the major Caillebotte retrospective staged at the Mus‚e d'Orsay in 1994, the work was known only through its placement in a pastel of 1878 representing an unidentified woman (fig. 3). Here it had been read by many not as a representation of a picture behind the sitter but as the mirror reflection of a man sitting opposite her. With the encouragement of Renoir, Caillebotte had joined the Impressionist group in 1876 at their second exhibition. By the time of the third show in the following year he had taken on many of the administrative duties necessary to mount the show. He was also an important financial backer for the enterprise, with his substantial private income supporting individual members of the group through some of their most straitened times. In Caillebotte's will, drafted in late 1876, he made special and generous provision for the staging of a future show in 1878, a project later abandoned for various reasons, not least of which included the disastrous sale of Ernest Hosched‚'s collection of Impressionist pictures in June 1878. In common with Degas, half of Caillebotte's submissions to the Fourth Impressionist exhibition were portraits, and Portrait de Monsieur R. belongs to a series of such works set in interiors made in the later 1870s and early 1880s. Other important examples include Portrait d'EugŠne Daufresne lisant (Switzerland, Private Collection; Berhaut 109), Dans un caf‚ (Rouen, Mus‚e des Beaux-Arts; B. 142) and Portrait de Richard Gallo (Kansas City, Nelson-Atkins Museum; B. 182). The identity of Monsieur R. is a mystery. It has been suggested by Berhaut, among others, that the sitter may be the man being rowed in Canotiers sur L'Yerres (fig. 4), a work executed in 1877 and also exhibited at the Fourth show. Certainly the unaffected langour of the sitter in Portrait de Monsieur R., coupled with his delicate features and the co-ordinated decoration of his apartment, point to his being an amatuer and a person familiar with the artistic milieu of Third Republic Paris. The apparent empathy with which Caillebotte portrays him strongly recalls Edouard Manet's famous portrait of his close friend, the poet St‚phane Mallarm‚ (fig. 5), painted in 1876 and hung in Mallarm‚'s dining room where Caillebotte might have been able to admire it during the poet's famous Tuesday night salons. The intimate mood of Portrait de Monsieur R. was perhaps in the mind of the critic Bertall (Charles-Albert d'Arnoux) when he wrote in L'Artiste of Caillebotte's pictures on view at the 1879 show: 'He has friends he loves and who love him. He seats them on strange sofas in fantastic poses'. Other reviewers of the exhibition concentrated on Caillebotte's palette. Louis Leroy, writing in Le Charivari on 17 April 1879, commented: 'Murger once sang the Symphony in Blue. Caillebotte brings it off better than anyone. Everything he does is blue. It is frightening to think how much he must spend on cobalt, ultramarine and indigo. Never has azure been squandered with such profusion on a canvas!' Just two days later Edmond Duranty took up this theme in Les Chroniques des Arts et de la Curiosit‚ : 'As for Caillebotte, it may well be that he was a victim of the blue and violet palette. He has not been painting very long, and perhaps his personal inclination would lead him into a different style.' The caricature accompanying Bec's article in Le Monde parisien (fig. 2) sought to illustrate the anatomical queries of the writer, with his observations of 'This young man dipped in blue has only one hand, M. Caillebotte. Of course you'll tell me it's big enough for two.'.