On June 26, 2023, La Poste issues a stamp illustrated by the family home in Yerres of the impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte.
The family home of the famous Impressionist painter, the Maison Caillebotte and above all its English-style park truly served as an open-air studio for the young Gustave from 1860 to 1879. Property of the lords of Yerres in the 16th century, of the Budé family – of the illustrious founder of the Collège de France – to several ministers of King Louis XV, this domain passed into bourgeois hands before the Revolution.
In 1824, it was Pierre Frédéric Borrel, owner of the "Rocher de Cancale" in Paris, who transformed the house into a neo-classical style villa and endowed it with an English-style park decorated with factories inviting you to travel.
But its bankruptcy forced it to sell and, in 1843, the widow of Martin Guillaume Biennais – the goldsmith of Napoleon I – enriched it with a bedroom in mahogany and gilded bronze.
In 1860, Gustave Caillebotte's father bought the property as it was to make it his holiday residence, with his family, far from the noisy works of Haussmann's Paris in full transformation.
Without changing the decorations or the style of the residence, he refurbished the gaming room and had the Swiss chalet, the aviary, the washhouse and the chapel built for his eldest son, Alfred, who was a priest, built in the park.
These years of family happiness in Yerres are felt in the works that Gustave Caillebotte will create then, playing with perspectives and light in the vegetable garden, the undergrowth, on the flower beds, the lawns, the river.
In 1879, after the death of their parents, the Caillebotte brothers sold the estate to a family who kept it for almost a century, then Paul Chaslin bought it in 1963 to preserve it from property development.
This property will return to the City of Yerres in 1973.
From 1995, the municipality will constantly renovate and animate it, thus celebrating the French way of life of a family of the modern bourgeoisie of the 19th century.
