Calf's Head and Ox Tongue

Gustave Caillebotte · c. 1882

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

73 × 54 cm (29 × 21 in.); Framed: 87.7 × 69.3 × 7.7 cm (34 1/2 × 27 1/4 × 3 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Realism

Calf's Head and Ox Tongue confronts the viewer with an almost clinical honesty — raw cuts of meat arranged on a cool surface, rendered with the same attentive eye Caillebotte brought to Parisian rooftops and rain-slicked boulevards. Trained as an engineer before turning fully to painting, Caillebotte approached composition with an unusual structural precision that set him apart from his Impressionist peers. His still lifes from the early 1880s carry that same quality: cool light, deliberate placement, an absence of sentimentality. Where other painters softened the domestic or the ordinary, Caillebotte held his gaze steady, treating a butcher's cuts with the same gravity he gave to men scraping floors. The painting was exhibited during the Impressionist years, when Caillebotte was already known as much for his financial support of the movement — funding exhibitions and acquiring his contemporaries' work — as for his own considerable output. This hand-painted oil reproduction follows the original canvas closely in scale, palette, and the particular quality of light that makes Caillebotte's realism feel so unnerving. Each brushstroke is applied by a skilled artist working directly from high-resolution reference material, resulting in a piece that carries the weight and presence of the original rather than the flatness of a print.