When Is Painting Men a Revolutionary Act?

While the rest of the Impressionists focused on painting women, Gustave Caillebotte mostly painted men.

But why is that significant?

Some Background: The European Male Nude

Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men, on view at the Getty Center through May 25, is a bracingly original take on artistic and gender norms.

Insights from the exhibition’s audio tour—accessible through the GettyGuide app—help frame the significance of Caillebotte’s subjects.

Let’s start with some context from art history:

In the 19th century, when Gustave Caillebotte was painting, the male nude in European art was mostly found in mythological and historical paintings. Men’s bodies were painted in an idealized way—as heroes or gods—based on antique sculpture.

Caillebotte wanted to do something different.

Modern Bodies: The Floor Scrapers

In The Floor Scrapers, Caillebotte painted the bodies of real men—not idealized forms.

“Caillebotte wants to be a modern painter, wants to be a realist,” says Paul Perrin, head of Collections at the Musée d’Orsay. “He wants to paint his time, so he has to find situations where he can find men naked or half-naked in reality.

“And that’s what we have here with The Floor Scrapers. It’s one of the situations of 19th-century life where men were allowed to be half-naked.”

Capturing Male Vulnerability: Man At His Bath

“This isn’t a nude. This guy is naked, and naked is different,” says Jonathan D. Katz, one of the founding figures of queer art history.

“It isn’t connected to the history of art. It is instead a personal moment of vulnerability.”

In this image, a man, probably a worker given the smock on the chair, has gotten out of the bath.

“I love the wet footprints,” says Katz, “and one of the reasons I love the wet footprints is that they take this scene out of the timeless and nonspecific and literally anchor it to the ground.”

Picturing male vulnerability was something revolutionary at the time.

“In this picture, we are invading his space, peering at him, and he doesn't know it. And so, something quite significant is happening, which is that the male figure has been inverted. What was once always the subject of a painting now becomes the object of our gaze.

“It’s unusual for men to be objects.

“We’re used to seeing passive female subjects arrayed for the delectation of the presumptively heterosexual male viewer. We are so attuned to that that it even escapes our notice. It's just the way things are.

“And then an artist like Caillebotte comes along, and we're suddenly forced to ask ourselves a question we didn't think we ever needed to ask, which is why are there mostly female nudes?”

When They’re Objects of Desire: Boating Party

In this painting, a city man in a top hat takes the oars of a boat on a Sunday afternoon.

“If you look at the art of that time, 99% of the iconography of boating is a man facing a woman,” says Perrin.

In Boating Party, we—the viewers of the painting—face the man. A painting like this makes you think about yourself: Who are you in this boat? Why are you in this boat with him?

With red-stained lips, the man in this painting seems to be the object of desire.

“The men depicted in Caillebotte's paintings allow us, regardless of our sex and gender, to appreciate the bodies of men...

“I think what is the most interesting thing in Caillebotte's art is how he brings that into impressionism, which is otherwise mainly about heterosexual men looking at women as objects of desire.”

Caillebotte: Painting Men is on view at the Getty Center through May 25, 2025. You can also explore the work and scholarship around Caillebotte: Painting Men in the accompanying exhibition catalog linked below.