Medium: oil on Strathmore, mounted on Masonite Size: 9" x 12"
Title: Gustave Caillebotte
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The impasse was broken by Guillaumin, who came in to tell me the bad news of Tanguy's death from cancer: "A day later," Guillaumin had said, "Caillebotte had passed on also, a victim of the influenza epidemic which has spread around Paris." After Guillaumin had left, I sat quietly next to the stove, thinking about these two men, and the sacrifices they had made for the cause they believed in. Both, like Chocquet, had backed the dissidents to the end, giving whatever was available of their resources to help the cause. Pere Tanguy, especially, who never was well off financially, left Madame Tanguy without funds, practically no cash, and very little in the way of inventory in the store on the Rue Clauzel except the pictures her husband had accepted for the indebtedness of the artists he had helped. Several of the painters who had benefited from the merchant's generosity, Guillaumin said, had come to Madame Tanguy's aid, planning a public auction of these works. The sale, Guillaumin went on to say, was being planned for the summer or fall of 1894. Caillebotte, on the other hand, whose large collection of radical work was far more extensive than Pere Tanguy's, created a hot political issue by bequeathing it to the government, an act that was almost certain to explode the traditional and the new ideas controversy that had only been simmering as both forces stood their ground. |