Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 8th October 2024–19th January 2025

Gustave Caillebotte (1848–94) was many things: a painter in the Impressionist circle, a patron of the arts, a flâneur in the modern city, a boat builder, a regatta sailor, a gardener and a philatelist, whose extensive collection now forms the basis of the stamp collection of the British Library, London. Coming from a wealthy family, he was long regarded primarily as a rich eccentric. That he was also a talented artist was discovered only decades after his death, partly because he kept most of his paintings to himself and chose not to exhibit them later in life. It is only in the last thirty years that Caillebotte’s works have become accessible to the general public through exhibitions and publications.[1] To mark the 130th anniversary of his death, the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, has organised a retrospective that includes 105 paintings by Caillebotte, thirty-five photographs and documents, as well as twenty-three objects and pieces of contemporary male dress. Unlike Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, whose scenes of modern life are populated by female figures and who also liked to paint mixed societies, in Caillebotte’s work men predominate, making up around seventy per cent of his subjects. His models were primarily people familiar to him: his brothers, the circle of friends he socialised with, household staff, bachelors like himself, workers in the service of his family, flat painters, water sports colleagues and neighbours. 

Caillebotte’s preference for male bodies is evident in two of his major works: Jeune homme à sa fenêtre (Young man at his window; 1876; cat. no.10), acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2021, and Partie de bateau (Boating party, c.1877–78; no.83), purchased by the Musée d’Orsay in 2022.[2] These new acquisitions provided the impetus for the current retrospective, which is co-organised by the three institutions – the Musée d’Orsay, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago – and curated by Scott Allan, Gloria Groom and Paul Perrin. By focusing on the men in Caillebotte’s art, the exhibition sets the artist in the context of the current gender discourse. The works are divided into ten thematic sections with a room for each section; the subjects include ‘Caillebotte and the Army’, ‘Gustave and his Brothers’, ‘Men on the Balcony’, ‘Painting the Naked Body’ and ‘The Pleasures of an Amateur’. Some of his paintings contain homoerotic references that deviate from the social and artistic norms of the 1870s and 1880s in France, which are discussed particularly in ‘Caillebotte and Male Dress’, ‘Painting the Naked Body’ and ‘Caillebotte and Sportsmen’. 

Caillebotte was fascinated by the male body. His Raboteurs de parquet (Floor scrapers; 1875; Musée d’Orsay; no.14) shows three men in a Paris flat, bent over and sweaty with their upper bodies bare, scraping long stripes off the oily, shiny floor. In Peintres en bâtiments (House painters; 1877; Musée d’Orsay; no.27) it is not clear whether the man standing on the pavement is looking at the painter on the ladder or observing his work. In Boating party the viewer’s gaze is directed straight to the rower’s genitals. Caillebotte’s preference is expressed even more directly in such paintings as Homme s’essuyant la jambe (Man drying his leg; c.1884; private collection; no.78) and Homme au bain (Man at his bath; no.79; Fig.19). Naked men were common in history painting and mythological subjects at the time and part of the curriculum at the academies. However, they rarely appeared in scenes of modern life; Frédéric Bazille’s and Cezanne’s bathers are exceptions. Caillebotte portrayed men with dignity and self-confidence, regardless of their social status. Yet he aimed neither at elevating their position nor at social criticism. Craftsmen and labourers were just as much a part of his repertoire as water sportsmen or men at their baths. For Caillebotte they had a similar importance as washerwomen, prostitutes and fashionistas for Degas. 

In 1873 Caillebotte enrolled at the conservative École des Beaux- Arts, Paris, but rarely attended. He joined the Impressionists through the mediation of Degas and made his debut at the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876 with paintings depicting bourgeois interiors and the life of his family. He also became their champion, supporter, exhibition organiser, patron and collector. His collection of Impressionist works, which he donated to the French state as a legacy, including Renoir’s Bal du moulin de la Galette (Dance at Moulin de la Galette; 1876), Claude Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare (1877), Édouard Manet’s Le balcon (The balcony; 1868–69) and Cezanne’s Le Golfe de Marseille vu de L’Estaque (Bay of Marseille seen from L’Estaque; 1878–79), are now part of the Musée d’Orsay’s core collection. The artist intended to donate around seventy works. However, as a result of an agreement between the museum’s administration and the executors of the will – Renoir and Caillebotte’s brother Martial – the bequest was reduced to forty works, supplemented by Caillebotte’s heirs with the donation of Raboteurs de parquet in 1894. Such a collection of Impressionist paintings was unique at the time, and it was instrumental in emphasising that Impressionist works were worthy of being in a museum. Today, they are scattered and integrated into the museum’s holdings. For the current exhibition, the legacy has been temporarily reunited in the Impressionist galleries of the Musée d’Orsay, with the exception of the drawings of Jean-François Millet and the pastels of Degas, which cannot be shown for conservation reasons. 

Between 1875 and 1882 Caillebotte created views of the Paris that document Baron Haussmann’s fundamental remodelling of the metropolis. Since the 1860s the narrow and winding alleyways had been radically transformed into spacious squares and boulevards. Of all his contemporaries, Caillebotte probably conveyed Haussmann’s aesthetic most directly. With his unerring eye and a realism that went beyond Impressionism, he recognised the rapid changes in the city and the mobility that accompanied them. More than fifty years before Alexander Rodchenko asserted in 1928 that ‘the most interesting perspectives are those from above downwards or from below upwards and their diagonals’, Caillebotte had already been producing views from above, made possible by the Haussmann-style buildings with their balconies on the higher floors.[3] Un refuge, boulevard Haussmann (A traffic island, boulevard Haussmann; 1880; private collection; no.53) and Boulevard vu d’en haut (Boulevard seen from above; no.54; Fig.21) are good examples. 

A major theme in the exhibition is the way Caillebotte presented Paris as the cradle of modern technology. His x (1876; Association des Amis du Petit Palais, Geneva; no.37) is a homage to the art of engineering and the exhibition includes various preparatory sketches and drawings as well as another version (no.38; Fig.20). In this painting from Fort Worth, the painter boldly focused on a detail of the bridge with three men. While the men stand to one side – the figure of one of them being cropped and their faces concealed – the vividly modelled nuts and bolts of the massive bridge construction are at the centre of the painting. The Geneva version shows a view along the bridge with numerous figures disappearing into the background; by greatly exaggerating the perspective, Caillebotte produced the impression that the people are in movement; as so often he confronted the permanent with the transitory. 

Caillebotte regularly retreated to the family estate in Yerres, around twenty kilometres south-east of Paris. In 1881 he acquired a country estate in Petit Gennevilliers, on the banks of the Seine opposite Argenteuil, together with his brother Martial. After Martial’s marriage in 1887, he settled permanently in Petit Gennevilliers with his long-term partner Charlotte Berthier. The artist captured his new surroundings in his paintings. In his scenes of outdoor life, he is closest to the Impressionists in terms of subjectmatter, the structuring brushwork and the bright colours, as in Chemin montant (Couple on a walk; 1881; Museum Barberini, Potsdam; no.93) and Les Roses, Jardin du Petit Gennevilliers (c.1886; private collection; no.98). 

By employing a photographic gaze, Caillebotte’s works epitomise the new way of seeing. With such pictorial inventions as unusual perspectives, radical upward and oblique views, close-ups and fragmentations, as well as the depiction of such unusual subjects as movement, the artist highlighted the close connection between painting and photography. Photographers such as André Kertész (1894–1985), Wols (1913–51) and László Moholy- Nagy (1895–1946) were inspired by Caillebotte’s work. The exhibition presents a varied, representative panorama of Caillebotte’s oeuvre, including an impressive ensemble of studies, sketches, detailed drawings and pastels. It was probably a reflection of his intense life that Caillebotte did not live to an old age but died of a heart attack at the age of forty-six.

[1] Catalogue: Caillebotte: peindre les hommes. By Scott Allan, Gloria Groom and Paul Perrin. 256 pp. incl. numerous col. ills. (Éditions Hazan, Vanves, 2024), €45. ISBN 978–2–7541–1707–4. English edition: Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men. 264 pp. incl. 195 col. ills. (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the Art Institute of Chicago, 2024), $50. ISBN 978–1–60606– 944–8. The exhibition will travel to the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (25th February 2025–25th May 2025) and to the Art Institute of Chicago (29th June 2025–5th October 2025). 

[2] The catalogue numbers given in this review are taken from the English version of the catalogue. 

[3] A. Rodtschenko: Aufsätze, autobiographische Notizen, Briefe, Erinnerungen, Dresden 1993, p.158; see also K. Sagner und M. Hollein, eds: Gustave Caillebotte: Ein Impressionist und die Fotografie, Frankfurt (Schirn Kunsthalle) 2012–13, p.60.