Exposition au musée

Caillebotte Painting Men

Until January 19th, 2025
Gustave Caillebotte
Partie de bateau, vers 1877-1878
Musée d'Orsay
Achat grâce au mécénat exclusif de LVMH, Grand Mécène de l’établissement, 2022
© Musée d’Orsay, dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Sophie Crépy
See the notice of the artwork

Introduction

More than the other painters in the Impressionist group, Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) always demonstrated a real predilection for male figures. Described by Gustave Geffroy as a “pictorial chronicler of modern life”, he depicted the appearance and existence of the men of his time; those he knew well – his brothers and friends – as well as those he encountered on the boulevards just outside his home, from labourers to members of the bourgeoisie out for a stroll.

Caillebotte’s “realistic” yet highly personal approach to these figures is suffused with explorations of his own male identity (an upper-middle-class painter, enthusiast, sportsman and bachelor) – reflecting his aspirations of breaking away from the antagonisms of class – and with a kind of admiration or even desire for a modern male ideal that defies gender stereotypes.  Not only did Caillebotte introduce new images of virility into painting, such as the labourer or the sportsman, but he was also keen to illustrate the more intimate – or “feminine” facet of middle-class men who while away the time playing cards, watching the city from their balconies or even washing and dressing themselves.

This was a time when the male and female spheres were further apart than ever, when the glorification of military virility, bourgeois patriarchy and republican fraternity clash with the birth of women’s emancipation and the emergence of homosexual subcultures. Caillebotte’s paintings reflect the reconfigurations at work in late 19th century society.

Focus: Caillebotte and the army

Although Caillebotte rarely depicted the military world and never war, these subjects played a significant role in his life, undoubtedly helping to shape his view of masculinity. His father made his fortune as an “entrepreneur des services des lits militaires”, supplying textiles to the army under the July Monarchy and the Second Empire. While studying law, Caillebotte was selected by lottery in February 1869 for military service. He managed to avoid it, as his father was able to pay for a “substitute”. But during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), he was drafted into the 7th Battalion of the Garde Nationale Mobile de la Seine and assigned to the defense of Paris. 

Under the Third Republic, as the country prepared for a new war and gradually made military service compulsory, Caillebotte was transferred to the active reserve, then to the territorial army. Caillebotte completed two periods of military service in 1876 and 1881, and was discharged in 1889. 

 

Gustave and his brothers

In the early 1870s, Caillebotte abandoned his law studies to become a painter and was accepted at the École des Beaux-Arts after training with Léon Bonnat at his studio. When his first submission to the Salon was rejected by the jury in 1875, he joined the Impressionist group, with whom he shared a desire to turn their back on tradition and represent contemporary society and their own existence in a realistic way. His first major paintings centred on his daily life, with his mother and brothers, in their private mansion in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, or their country house in Yerres (Essonne). His father Martial, who died in 1874 when Gustave was only 26, is absent from these pieces, but the opulent estates he built or bought attest to his great social success. Martial senior encouraged his sons to pursue their artistic passions, painting for Gustave and music for his brother, also called Martial.

Gustave’s younger brothers were among his first models. Through them, he explored his bourgeois identity and his place in society. His two brothers and one half brother had a significant impact on him, and he spent his whole life attempting to recapture and depict this sense of belonging to a group, modelled on a fraternal ideal.

Work and Labour

Having grown up near the family textile factory in Paris, a city with a growing working-class population, Caillebotte was once of the first to dedicate large paintings to urban workers. Likely rejected by the jury of the 1875 Salon, The Floor Scrapers attracted everyone’s attention at the 1876 Impressionist exhibition. The artist’s interest in creating a realistic representation of these half-naked labourers, revealing the arduousness of their work, was something very new. This painting can be interpreted as the artist’s expression of a modern male ideal, masculine, republican, rooted in the notion of collective effort, work, equality and fraternity. While these models (his family's employees) are seen from the perspective of the bourgeois painter, Caillebotte also stated his contempt for “so-called social distinctions” and identified with them, as a manual worker, particularly in The House Painters. “A tireless worker by temperament, unable to tolerate idleness” (according to a journalist writing in the magazine Le Yacht), the artist therefore sought to escape his condition as a wealthy rentier and found fulfilment in the brotherly bonds he forged with men from other milieux, such as Renoir, within the Impressionist group.

Focus: Caillebotte and menswear 1/2

The critic Duranty noted in La Nouvelle peinture (1876): “What we need is the special note of the modern individual, in his clothing, in the midst of his social habits, at home or in the street”. Subscribing to this “realistic” project, Caillebotte focused on the representation of male costume. 

Workers' clothing, colored blue or light white, stands out from bourgeois suits, which are usually black. In Peintre en bâtiments, a worker even allows himself to wear a boater, a leisure accessory. Caillebotte used these elements to balance his compositions, but also to emphasize the uniformity of color in the modern city. He contrasts the worker's ample blouse (similar to that worn by painters) with the narrow frock coats and jaquettes of the bourgeoisie, emphasizing the freedom of movement allowed by these garments.

Light-colored or colorful suits with patterns (stripes, checks, houndstooth, etc.) were also accepted for men, as country or “seasonal” clothing; Caillebotte depicted them in his holiday and boating scenes.

 

The City is ours

Among Caillebotte's most spectacular compositions are these ambitious urban views of Paris, which garnered a great deal of attention at the 1877 Impressionist exhibition. Their large format, complex spatial construction and immersive framing produces a powerful sense of reality. Much greater in scale than what was generally accepted for such subjects, they elevate modern life to the heroic status of history painting.

Caillebotte's vision of the city is at once emblematic of modernity, through the novelty of the architecture, and highly personal. The artist, who grew up in the old Faubourg Saint-Denis, had spent nearly a decade living in these new bourgeois neighbourhoods in western Paris.  Every day, he walked along its streets and boulevards to his friends’ studios and the cafés where they would meet, in the districts of Europe and Batignolles.

These compositions also reflect the confidence and freedom with which men occupied the public space – a fundamentally male domain up to the 19th century –, be they property owners like Caillebotte, who inherited several buildings from his father in 1874, or workers of more modest means.

Focus: Caillebotte and menswear 2/2

Aiming to depict “the heroism of modern life”, as Baudelaire put it, Caillebotte painted large-scale, contemporary figures in which men's suits played a major role.

By juxtaposing several similar silhouettes, he emphasizes the uniformity of the bourgeois wardrobe, dark and almost monochrome (Baudelaire saw it as “the expression of universal equality”). The banishment of luxurious colors and materials went hand in hand with the promotion of a virile culture of self-control and restraint, reserving for women the seduction of color and ornament. Caillebotte emphasizes this republican uniformity, which confers the same silhouette on rentiers and servants alike. He does, however, note the details that individualize his models (the man's open collar in Au Café, and the fashionable accessories in the portrait of Paul Hugot).

He also sought to render the body beneath the clothing, showing a particular interest in nonchalant, relaxed attitudes, expressing a virile ease. These gestures were aided by the evolution of men's suits, which became fuller and more comfortable in the 1870s and 1880s. The paletot (wide, straight, draped overcoat) triumphed. They are omnipresent in Caillebotte's paintings.

 

Men on the Balcony

After the death of his parents, Caillebotte, aged thirty-one, sold the family mansion and moved with his brother Martial into a large apartment on the fourth floor of a grand building on boulevard Haussmann. With the invention of the lift, homes grew taller and the upper floors became noble spaces, as evidenced by the long balcony on the brothers’ apartment. It was here that the artist had his friends pose for original compositions – while the window was a traditional motif in painting, the Haussmannian balcony was a novelty. From here, these (bourgeois) men appear to dominate the city, joining in the hustle and bustle of the street without mingling with the crowd.  Looking at ease in this space, halfway between the public, male-dominated sphere of the street and the private, female-dominated sphere of the home (as they were viewed at the time), their meditative or melancholy expressions nevertheless suggest a sense of isolation.

This original perspective inspired Caillebotte to create singular “bird's-eye” views of the boulevards, painted on his balcony, where silhouettes, reduced to a few touches of colour, seem to wander through an abstracted space.

Portraits of Bachelors

“He has friends whom he loves and is loved by: he sits them on strange sofas, in fantastical poses,” writes the critic Bertall, no doubt mocking the languid pose and invasive motifs of Portrait of M. R., no doubt perceived as feminine and emasculating. Caillebotte, who painted numerous portraits of men in the late 1870s and early 1880s, was often more understated, favouring the almost empty interior of his apartment and restrained, even austere poses and expressions, to conform to what was expected of men in the 19th century (without ornamentation or sentiment). This simplicity brings out the strong physical presence of his models and the intensity of their gaze, lost in thought or staring at the painter.

This world which, like Caillebotte's social circles, was almost exclusively male, occasionally allowed for a female presence, no doubt the artist's “friend” Charlotte Berthier, ten years his junior (they did not marry and had no children). Most of the models in these portraits lived near him and also remained bachelors, something which, in a society that measured male accomplishment by family, could be seen as somewhat marginal.

Painting the Nude Body

Caillebotte painted very few nudes, but in the early 1880s, he made three paintings on the subject, one depicting a woman and the other two a man. These paintings are particularly innovative in their uncompromising realism: no historical or mythological pretext, no idealisation of bodies, shown in all their reality.  Nude on a Couch, one of his largest formats, was not exhibited during his lifetime. Man at His Bath was only presented in Brussels, in 1888, at an exhibition organized by the avant-garde “XX group”, which relegated it to a back room.

Were these works too subversive? While the theme of the “toilette” was not new – Caillebotte was inspired by Degas –, substituting a man for a female model, depicting him intimately, from behind, in a vulnerable position, conferring the role of voyeur on the viewer and, indeed, offering up his anatomy so frankly to the gaze and delight of others, shattered conventions of the time. These works, which have raised questions about the artist's sexuality (of which we know nothing), challenge notions of eroticism and gender. Their mystery defies any easy interpretation.

Caillebotte and sportsmen

Leisure culture developed in France in the second half of the19th century. It inspired Caillebotte to create a major series of works on the theme of boating and swimming, presented at the 1879 Impressionist exhibition. But unlike most artists of his generation, for whom these subjects were a pretext for depicting men and women flirting in boats or at guinguettes, Caillebotte paints serious, men-only boating as a sport. Reflecting a new, masculine culture celebrating the act of surpassing oneself, discipline, physical strength and collective effort, outdoor sport was seen as an antidote to the supposedly emasculating evils and vices of modern society.

But these compositions are not without a certain sensuality. Caillebotte brings the viewer up-close with these young, athletic men in their simple white shirts, the sun, the fresh air, the speed and the natural surroundings.

The eminently modern subject matter is also highly personal. These sportsmen are not taking part in major competitions on the Seine or the Marne; they are simply rowing on the Yerres, a river that ran alongside the grounds of the Caillebotte country house, south-east of Paris.

The Pleasures of an « amateur »

In the early 1880s, Gustave and Martial Caillebotte sold their Yerres estate and purchased a property in Petit-Gennevilliers, on the banks of the Seine. There, they could truly indulge in their passion for yachting, as well as gardening. When Martial married in 1887, Gustave left Paris and settled permanently in the suburbs with his partner Charlotte Berthier, a few domestic servants and two sailors. The only times he left the Paris area was to take part in regattas in Normandy. Following the dissolution of the Impressionist group in the 1880s, and the end of their joint exhibitions, he rarely exhibited in Paris. However, he continued to paint with great enthusiasm, in a bolder style than ever, producing works inspired by his “amateur” activities, for which a few members of his inner circle posed.

The painter brings together his various passions in his final large-format work, Regatta at Argenteuil (1893). He depicts himself as a sailor, at the helm of a racing boat he designed and had built himself, sailing with another man on the Seine; a certain idea of happiness, or at least of freedom. The artist died shortly afterwards of “cerebral congestion” on February 22, 1894, at the age of forty-five.