“Amateur” is what they called artist Gustave Caillebotte, a bourgeois bachelor who lived in a well-appointed apartment in the Saint-Lazare district of Paris. There he worked tirelessly promoting Impressionism, a forum for his artworks as well as those of friends like Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet. Unrecognized in his time, Caillebotte is considered quintessential to the impressionist movement today.
“Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men” at the Getty Center is the largest show of the artist’s work staged in the western U.S. in the past 30 years. Co-curated by the Getty’s Scott Allan, it includes large-scale works like his 1877 masterpiece Paris Street; Rainy Day, which made the journey from the Art Institute of Chicago (where the show goes in June), and Floor Scrapers, which traveled from Musée d’Orsay (from whence the show came).
The socio-political atmosphere of Caillebotte’s Paris shares some commonalities with our own era. The French were bedeviled by the notion of masculinity and deepening antagonism between the classes. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 lasted mere months before the French, outgunned, outclassed and outmanned, surrendered Paris, but the conflict dragged out for an additional five months before signing an armistice in May of 1871, marking the beginning of the nation’s Third Republic. The defeat came as a surprise to the French, raising doubts about the virility of their men as well as the country’s place in Europe’s power structure. Simultaneously, the Paris Commune of 1871, in which workers took over a significant portion of the city center, was a direct challenge to the status quo.
“The trauma of that defeat was very real, and it signaled a kind of loss of political status for France, and you had the civil conflict with the Commune,” Allan, who co-curated the exhibition with Chicago’s Gloria Groom and Orsay’s Paul Perrin, told Observer. “There was this emphasis on virility and masculinity as being something that is of some urgent social-political cultural concern in the aftermath of the war. And add to that demographic decline in France, declining birth rates.”
Caillebotte was a confirmed bachelor who, though he lived with longtime companion Charlotte Berthier, preferred the company of men. They are everywhere in his paintings at a time when other artists were painting women. The Bezique Game (1880) features a cluster of bachelors around a card table, and Young Man at His Window (1876), acquired by the Getty at auction in 2021 for $53 million, is a portrait of his brother René from behind as he looks out over the boulevard. One canvas shows a platoon of soldiers barracking on the family property in Yerre, and another is a full-length portrait of an insouciant recruit smoking a cigarette, his gaze lost in the distance. And there are nudes, Man at His Bath and Man Drying His Leg (1884), painted at a time when most nudes were women.
In the context of the Third Republic, the right kind of Frenchman fits the bourgeois model, i.e., married and procreating. Caillebotte was a childless bachelor and an artist—de-virilizing traits that were partly blamed for demographic decline and shrinking birth rates. “He’s interested in the ideals of fraternity. He wanted to be seen as an active, productive member of society in his pursuits. He’s dedicated to science and technology and progress, the advancement of knowledge. His self-presentation is a self-consciously virile image, which cuts against the stereotype of the proto-homosexual,” says Allan, mentioning a photo taken of Caillebotte in drag. “Our recent election became a weird discourse on masculinity, and I’m glad this show is happening in that environment because what we don’t want is for masculinity to be treated in a reductive or highly politicized way. We want it to be complicated and ambiguous and contradictory. Identity is complicated; it’s not Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt.”
Caillebotte trained with Léon Bonnat, whose studio fed students to École des Beaux-Arts. From there, Caillebotte emerged as a realist, emphasizing perspective and smooth paint application characterized by Floor Scrapers, a composition featuring three shirtless workers on their knees, scraping dark finish off the floor of what would become the artist’s studio. In 1875 he submitted it to the Salon but was rejected.
“The subject matter may have had something to do with it,” Allan points out. “In the aftermath of the commune, there’s a lot of sensitivity and anxiety and paranoia about the working class. So, for Caillebotte to install three lean and muscled, slightly sinister-looking workers in a fancy bourgeois apartment in the Salon where you have a well-heeled audience, confronting them with this image of the working class, male urban laborers in the aftermath of the Commune—that in and of itself could be seen as a provocation.” Images of laborers at the time mainly depicted peasants, as often seen in the works of Jean-François Millet, who died in 1875. Floor Scrapers modernized this tradition, placing it in an urban context, but also referenced another great painter of peasants, Gustave Courbet, the exiled Communard responsible for toppling the Vendôme Column in 1871.
Invited by Degas to exhibit in the first Impressionist show of 1874, Caillebotte waited until 1876 to present Floor Scrapers. In time, he became a strong advocate for the group, renting space and paying for publicity out of his own pocket and even helping with installation. He showed again in the following year and then again in 1879 and 1880. Skipping 1881 after a rift with Degas, he returned in 1882 when the movement was beginning to fray. “Monet and Renoir needed less and were more successful with buyers in the market. They’re bouncing back and forth between the Salon and Impressionists. And dealers start doing individual shows. The motivation for these independent group shows starts to fall away, and artists are going their separate ways,” explains Allan.
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Caillebotte continued painting in his thirties but was less committed to the impressionist movement, although his style fully embraced the aesthetic. He started spending more time in Yerres, a Paris suburb, boating and painting large-scale works of his new circle of friends in The Paris Boating Club. His palette was brighter, and as with some earlier works, the compositions indicate the use of photographs in their cropping (similar to the work of his old friend Degas), but Caillebotte continued to struggle with perspective, inadvertently foreshortening seated figures.
“He was still painting, but his attention was divided in a lot of ways,” says Allan. “He wanted a big audience in the context of the impressionist shows because he wanted to prove himself as an artis,t and he wanted the validation those shows brought. But without that context some of that motivation is lost, and he’s painting mainly for himself and an inner circle of friends.”
In 1888, Caillebotte relocated to Petit-Gennevilliers on the banks of the Seine near Argenteuil. He had ceased showing his work six years earlier and devoted himself to gardening and to building and racing yachts, spending most of his time with his brother, Martial, and Renoir. He died of pulmonary congestion while working in his garden in 1894 at the age of 45. Following his death his work as an artist was overshadowed by his activities promoting Impressionism until well into the 20th Century.
“Around the time of his death there are a few stray comments where his fellow Impressionists note he wasn’t just a wealthy amateur, he was an artist of importance,” concludes Allan. “The group had a lot of amateurs in it. Gauguin was a stockbroker, an amateur who went all in. Caillebotte was a fellow traveler, he and Renoir and Monet.”
“Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men” is at the Getty Center through May 25, 2025.
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