May 15, 2025
Gustave Caillebotte
Painting Men
The J. Paul Getty Museum
February 25 - May 25, 2025

Gustave Caillebotte
Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) was a French painter most often associated with the Impressionists — Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, and Camille Pissarro among others. Like many of his contemporaries, he painted the environs in and around Paris and captured aspects of the bustling city of the 1800s. Caillebotte was born in 1848 to an upper-class family and later in life when he pursued his artistic career, he was both admired and resented for his Bourgeois lifestyle. Although he studied law and even served in the Franco-Prussian war, after receiving his inheritance, he moved to Boulevard Haussmann in Paris with one of his brothers, began to study painting and befriended other artists. It was during this time that he developed what was to become his signature style.
Although Impressionism was gaining popularity in the late 1800s, Caillebotte's style was more representational than others in his circle. While his contemporaries often painted scenes filled with women and families, he gravitated more toward depictions of men. The exhibition Painting Men celebrates the breadth of his career, specifically on his portrayals of men — bachelor friends and upper-class colleagues — roaming the streets of Paris, and engaging in leisurely activities like gardening and boating. Caillebotte unabashedly painted athletic male bodies, often in the nude as in Man at His Bath (1884) where he lovingly depicts the muscular hindside of a man toweling off after a bath. The Boating Party (1877-78) is a painting of a lone, well-dressed man in a rowboat thoughtfully gazing towards the left side of the image. He appears intent on the motion of the boat and indifferent to those sharing the waterway with him. Caillebotte's images have a photographic quality with his subjects often presented in close-up as if seen through a zoom lens. He had no issues cropping figures at the edges of his canvases and in the The Boating Party, the composition is a closely focused image that cuts off the bottom of the boat and the boatman's lower legs.
Though he was interested in Paris as a city, as well as its countryside, many of his images also show domestic and family scenes, often using his brother Martial as a model. To help understand his trajectory and the nuances of his subject matter, the exhibition is divided into seven sections. These include: Family Milieu, Bourgeois Couples, Close Friends, Working Men, Military Men, The Nude and Modern Paris. It opens with images of Caillebotte's home life: people reading, gazing out of windows, playing pool or the piano. This section — Family Milieu — includes the magnificent Young Man at His Window (1876), a painting of a man from the back (the model was Caillebotte's brother, who was also a photographer), standing at an open window, looking out at a city street. This work is an example of what became a genre termed "The New Painting"— representational work that "portrayed modern individuals in their everyday environments" in contrast to the more academic paintings of the period.The group of works represented in Modern Paris are some of his best known. In Paris Street, Rainy Day (1877), Caillebotte paints just that — a street scene on a rainy day. In the foreground, individuals, as well as couples, stroll down the boulevard, going about their business, taking leisurely walks while holding umbrellas. The cobblestone streets and multi-story buildings recede in the background. The painting has a photographic sensibility as if selected from a larger whole as Caillebotte crops the legs of the central figures— a couple who appear to be walking toward the viewer, as well as half of a man moving in the opposite direction at the right edge.
The centerpiece of Working Men is the painting Floor Scrapers (1875) where Caillebotte depicts three shirtless workers on their knees planning a wooden floor in a well lit room. Although a cityscape appears in the balcony window, all that is portrayed outside are faint rooftops. Though at work, the men appear to be engaged with each other. There is even an open bottle of red wine and beside it, a half filled glass. The men's clothes are piled near a far wall trimmed with gold piping. Caillebotte made studies and drawings for many of his paintings while working on his compositions and visual relationships. It is a delight to see these presented alongside the finished paintings. In this section, a sketch for Floor Scrapers, as well as a loose grid of drawings are on view. These pencil on paper works are explorations of the worker's hand movements, as well as their body positions. While Caillebotte's wealth and generosity toward other artists was well documented, at the time there was little written about his fascination with men — rather they spoke about his "homosocial" life — more social interactions with men than women. Floor Scrapers is an example of his voyeuristic gaze in addition to his loving depiction of the half naked male figures.
A number of photographs by Caillebotte's brother Martial and snapshots by other friends provide context for the paintings as they document Caillebotte's circle. A few self portraits are also on view. These illustrate not only Caillebotte's skills as a draughtsman and painter, but also how he saw himself. Rich and well educated, Caillebotte indulged his life as a flaneur. He promenaded along the streets of Paris, relaxed at the family estate in Yerres and later gardened and boated at Petit-Gennevilliers, a property he acquired on the Seine near Argenteuil. Caillebotte's images have affinities with those of his contemporaries as other painters of the time were interested in documenting the Hausmanization of Paris. Though Caillebotte lived a short life— he died at age 45 in 1894— he was well regarded as both a patron and an artist. His many paintings and drawings not only recorded his impressions of Parisian life at the time, they also depict his relationship to art and culture, as well as to men.
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