Portrait de Jean Daurelle en pied

Jean Daurelle was a French businessman and patron who commissioned this full-length portrait from Caillebotte, probably in the late 1870s or 1880s. Full-length standing portraits were the prestige format of official portraiture — associated with grand-manner precedents from Van Dyck through Lawrence — and Caillebotte's willingness to work within this convention alongside his more experimental urban canvases demonstrates his dual identity as both avant-garde painter and conventional portraitist for Parisian bourgeois clients. The work belongs to a strand of his practice that has received less critical attention than his famous floor-scrapers and street scenes.

Caillebotte employs a high-keyed palette for the interior setting, the full-length figure posed against furnishings rendered with the same attentive materialism he brought to floors and fabrics in his more celebrated works. The strong vertical of the standing figure is offset by horizontal spatial recession into the interior beyond.