Born into a wealthy family, Caillebotte (1848-1894) trained to be an engineer but became interested in painting and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He met Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet in 1874 and showed his works at the Impressionist exhibition of 1876 and its successors. Caillebotte became the chief organizer, promoter, and financial backer of the Impressionist exhibitions for the next six years, and he used his wealth to purchase works by Monet, Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, and Berthe Morisot.

Caillebotte was an artist of remarkable abilities, but his posthumous reputation languished because most of his paintings remained in the hands of his family and were neither exhibited nor reproduced until the second half of the 20th century. His early paintings feature the broad new boulevards and modern apartment blocks created by Baron Haussmann for Paris in the 1850s and '60s. The iron bridge depicted in "Le Pont de l'Europe" typifies this interest in the modern urban environment, while "Floor-Scrapers" (1875) is a realistic scene of urban craftsmen busily at work. Caillebotte's masterpiece, "Paris Street; Rainy Day" (1877; Art Institute of Chicago), uses bold perspective to create a monumental portrait of a Paris intersection on a rainy day. Caillebotte also painted portraits and figure studies, boating scenes and rural landscapes, and decorative studies of flowers. He tended to use brighter colours and heavier brushwork in his later works.