Gustave Caillebotte's Unusual, Radical Impressionist Men On Tour

Forbes

12-04-2025

'Paris Street, Rainy Day,' 1877 Gustave Caillebotte (French, 1848-1894). Oil on canvas, 83 9/16 x 108 3/4 in (212.2 x 276.2 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago, Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection, 1964.336.
Art Resource, NY EX.2025.2.79
Degas' ballet dancers. Renoir's voluptuous nudes. Mary Cassatt and Berthé Morisot's mothers with children. Monet's portraits of his first wife Camille; Renoir's and Manet's portraits of Camille.
French Impressionism was flush with paintings of women.
Then there was Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894).
Caillebotte occupied a central position within the Impressionist group. His family wealth allowed him to become an essential financial backer to numerous Impressionist painters and amass one of the finest collections of their work. When Caillebotte died, his bequest of artwork to the French state eventually formed the backbone of Paris' Musée d'Orsay's unrivaled collection of Impressionist paintings. Renoir was the executor of his estate.
Caillebotte was a damn good painter too, and he painted men. He painted men to such an unusual degree when compared to his contemporaries that three of the greatest art museums in the world–the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Orsay–have teamed up to explore why this was through an exhibition, 'Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men.'
On view are a stupefying assemblage of paintings among the most celebrated from the Impressionist movement and Modernism more broadly. Seeing them together like this without a time machine set for 1880s Paris, almost surely never again. Two are particularly noteworthy for filling art history textbooks: Floor Scrapers (1875) from the Orsay and the Art Institute's Paris Street, Rainy Day (1877). Paintings that turn ordinary people into art nerds.
'Floor Scrapers,' 1875, Gustave Caillebotte (French, 1848-1894). Oil on canvas, 40 3/16 x 57 1/16 in (102 x 145 cm). Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Gift of the heirs of Caillebotte through his executor Auguste Renoir, 1894.
Musée d'Orsay. dist Grand Palais RMN / Patrice Schmidt EX.2025.2.32
Answering the million-dollar question of why Caillebotte painted more men more prominently than any other Impressionist by a wide margin begins with biography. The artist came from a family of brothers, went to all male schools, served in the all-male French military, and trained as an artist in an all-male studio. He was a member of numerous amateur associations like the Paris Sailing Club that were exclusively male. He was a committed bachelor his entire life.
All the other French Impressionist men lived in a similarly male dominated society, so that's only part of the answer.
Caillebotte's reality was unique from his peers due to his wealth. His father accumulated a self-made fortune and then died along with Caillebotte's mother and a brother in quick succession in the 1870s, leaving the artist money to share with one other brother before turning 30.
Flush with cash, Caillebotte didn't need to create for the market. He could paint whatever he wanted, even subjects not favored by collectors. Subjects like men. And not men of the aristocracy.
'Caillebotte had a lot of cross class affinity,' Getty curator Scott Allan told Forbes.com. 'He's interested in working guys. He's comfortable around working guys; often, they're his employees, but you get this sense that Caillebotte was happier hanging out with the gardener, or the sailors he employed, or the guys at the shipyard that were building the boats he designed, than he was making the rounds in high society in Paris.'
Such was the case with Floor Scrapers.
'This was not a subject you saw on the walls of the (Paris) Salon. There are plenty of pictures touching on themes of labor, but it's always peasant labor out in the countryside; (Caillebotte) modernizes it and urbanizes it,' Allan said. 'It was a provocative choice to have these working-class guys stripped to the waist in a fancy bourgeois apartment.'
The painting was made six years after the Paris Commune, a brutally suppressed working class uprising.
'There's a lot of anxiety among the property classes about potential further violent uprisings–there's a big wealth gap,' Allan explained. 'Caillebotte was being politically provocative too in his choice of some of these male subjects; he wanted to push the limits.'
Caillebotte's interest in painting men is also tied up in his country's history immediately predating the 1871 Paris Commune.
'After France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian war (1870–1871), there's a heightened concern about the state of French manhood, virility,' Allan said.
The Franco-Prussian war was a humiliating, demoralizing affair for the French, ending the nation's power over continental Europe.
'So, there's this new cultural emphasis on virility and that comes across in Caillebotte's art,' Allan continued. 'He's invested in certain notions of masculinity in complicated and nuanced ways. His depictions of modern sportsmen, bathers, soldiers all key into this broader concern around issues of virility.'
Caillebotte's career also coincides with the beginning of France's Third Republic (1870–1940).
'There's this rejuvenation of these Republican values: liberty, equality, fraternity,' Allan said. 'A new reemphasis on this idea of fraternity–of democratic male citizenship–is important in the cultural background. This idea of fraternity is a good overarching framework for this exhibition because it works on the family level, but also more broadly on the social, cultural, political level. It is a concept that runs through the exhibition in a lot of ways.'
'Fraternity' not in the American sense of college guys getting drunk and acting a fool; 'fraternity' in the sense of brotherhood. Values, interests, and objectives for the nation shared by men. A bond.
'Boating Party,' about 1877-78. Gustave Caillebotte (French, 1848-1894). Oil on canvas, 35 1/4 x 45 15/16 in (89.5 x 116.7 cm). Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Painting listed "national treasure" by the French Republic, acquired with the exclusive patronage of LVMH, major patron of the Musée d'Orsay, 2022.
Grand Palais RMN (Musée d'Orsay) / Franck Raux EX.2025.2.35
Caillebotte's wealth and the artistic freedom it provided him was also paired with great ambition and a radical streak.
'He's in this very competitive avant-garde milieu. Degas is doing his milliners and laundresses and ballet dancers. Renoir is doing these pretty Parisiennes–these major figure painters that he is friends with and rivals with, and modern masculinity is relatively untapped iconographic terrain,' Allan said. '(Painting men is) a way for Caillebotte to differentiate himself and broaden the horizons of painting modern life.'
Caillebotte routinely, provocatively, intentionally substituted men into paintings where women had previously been. Men playing the piano. Men rowing boats.
'He unsettles the gender expectation of painting. He does it time and again. One obvious example, his notorious, naked man toweling off after a bath (1884's Man at His Bath),' Allan said. 'This is something you did not see, especially in large scale painting at the time–totally unheard of. There are plenty of nude bathers, but it's always women. In Caillebotte's immediate circle in the 1880s, Degas is doing one nude female bather after another, and they're incredibly radical from an artistic point of view, but kind of conventional in this focus on the female nude.'
As a response, Caillebotte applied the male gaze to men. Again, directly from the artist's lived experience. He would have seen naked men bathing while serving in the army and then the reserves. He would have seen floor scrappers working on his properties. Paris Street, Rainy Day, that was the path he walked through Paris daily.
'He's an iconographic innovator. He's highly original in his selection of subjects and I think he wanted to be seen as extremely original and modern and bold in his choices,' Allan said. 'Part of his strategy is a gendered strategy. He's really aware of what the artists in the circle are doing.'
'Man at His Bath,' 1884, Gustave Caillebotte (French, 1848-1894). Oil on canvas 57 x 45 in (144.8 x 114.3 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Museum purchase with funds by exchange from an anonymous gift, Bequest of William A. Coolidge, Juliana Cheney Edwards Collection, and from the Charles H. Bayley Picture and Painting Fund, Mary S. and Edward J. Holmes Fund, Fanny P. Mason Fund in memory of Alice Thevin, Arthur Gordon Tompkins Fund, Gift of Mrs. Samuel Parkman Oliver—Eliza R. Oliver Fund, Sophie F. Friedman Fund, Robert M. Rosenberg Family Fund, and funds donated in honor of George T. M. Shackelford, Chair, Art of Europe, and Arthur K. Solomon Curator of Modern Art, 1996–2011.
© 2025 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston EX. 2025.2.80
Was Caillebotte gay?
Is that the reason he painted so many men?
'It's a hard question to resolve,' Allan admitted. 'His paintings certainly make room for a homoerotic gaze, people bring that to the paintings for sure. It's a valid response, but in the show, (we're) trying to avoid reducing the art to the question of the artist's sexuality. We really want to emphasize the issue of gender expression and how it intersects with painting and Caillebotte's interest in modern masculinity.'
No contemporary correspondence or accounts from the artist or associates indicates Caillebotte was gay. He did have a prominent, long-term relationship of an uncertain nature with a woman.
Viewers get into trouble reading 19th century paintings from a 21st century perspective, especially when it comes to sexuality.
'Relations between men were very different in the 19th century,' Allan said. 'If you read correspondence between men in the 19th century, sometimes it can seem weirdly intimate in a way that that is very different from today.'
Man at His Bath feels homoerotic in 2025. Maybe. Maybe it was contemporary commentary on new hygiene practices promoted within the French army Caillebotte observed. Maybe it was deliberately provocative. Maybe it was a response to Degas.
The exhibition goes out of its way not to bog down over the 'is he/isn't he' question of Caillebotte's sexuality.
'You get into these terrible conversations where the people who don't want a queer reading of Caillebotte will be like, 'Well, look, he did a female nude too, and that's an even bigger and more important painting.' Then the people who want to advance a queer reading of Caillebotte will be like, 'Don't straight-wash Caillebotte,' Allan said. 'I don't want to reduce the art to the question of the artist's sexuality. That's so reductive. The nude is a major genre of painting with a long tradition, and first and foremost, we have to understand how Caillebotte is intervening in a genre of painting and doing interesting new things that mess with our expectations, maybe unsettle our position as viewers. That's part of the radical charge of his art. To simply say, 'Oh, he was gay, and that's why he painted this,' it's so much more interesting and complicated than that.'
'Painting Men' can be seen for free at the Getty Center in Los Angeles through May 25, 2025, before heading off to the Art Institute of Chicago from June 29 to October 5, 2025.