Eye Spy Caillebotte

In anticipation for the exhibition, Gustave Caillebotte: Impressionist Paintings from Paris to the Sea, my colleague and I, Adelia Gregory, Museum Educator and School Partnership Coordinator, created a small guide to be used in the galleries to encourage visitors to look more closely at the works in the exhibition. The Eye Spy guide is primarily designed for our younger audience along with their families, but we’ve seen many people of all ages using them.

In creating Eye Spy, Adelia and I wanted to encourage visitors to look closely at the rich details of the paintings in the exhibition and help open a door to a sense of wonder and identification with the artist’s process. For example, a viewer might notice that bodies of water are not just blue, but include whites, pinks, greens, and oranges to show reflections of light and objects in the surrounding landscape. We also wanted to bring attention to the way Caillebotte intentionally used brushstokes to show movement and capture a sense of liveliness. By focusing on the details, we hoped to help reveal the artist’s process and show the visceral qualities these paintings offer.

If you have not seen these in the gallery and are curious, here’s a PDF version to peruse. In the gallery, the pages were laminated for durability and the guide was designed to sit alongside our other options for interpretation including the cell phone gallery guide, wall texts and object chat labels.