Autoportrait

Caillebotte painted at least two self-portraits, both dating from the early 1890s, near the end of his life. Self-portraiture was not a major strand of his practice, and these late self-examinations have a directness and psychological weight consistent with the introspective quality of his garden paintings from the same period. Unlike his more programmatic urban subjects, the self-portrait belongs to the tradition of private artistic self-accounting that runs from Rembrandt through Courbet.

Caillebotte faces the viewer directly, employing the plain three-quarter format standard for self-portraiture. His brushwork in the face is more precise than his garden works — the self-portrait requiring a different kind of sustained observation — while the background and costume are treated with broader, less detailed handling.