Gustave Caillebotte was born in France and was an engineer by profession.He attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He met Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, and Pierre Auguste Renoir and helped organize the first impressionist exhibition in Paris.He participated in later shows and painted some 500 works in a more realistic style than that of his friends. Caillebotte's most intriguing paintings are those of the broad, new Parisian boulevards. The boulevards were painted from high vantage points and were populated with elegantly clad figures strolling with the expressionless intensity of somnambulists, as in Boulevard Vu d'en Haut in a private collection.Caillebotte's superb collection of impressionist paintings was left to the French government on his death.