New Book Explores Masculinity and Identity within Caillebotte’s Oeuvre

More than any other French Impressionist, painter Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894) observed and depicted the many men in his life, including his brothers and friends, employees, and the workers and bourgeois in his Parisian neighborhood.

Male subjects feature prominently in some of his best-known works, such as Floor Scrapers, Man at His Bath, Young Man at His Window, Boating Party, and Paris Street, Rainy Day. Caillebotte seems to have been preoccupied with notions of masculinity and virility, particularly at a moment when the question of men’s place in society was being posed with fresh urgency. The modernity of Caillebotte’s subject matter and artistic vision was inextricably bound up with a questioning of masculine identity that seems freshly relevant today.

The originality of his paintings of men is fully explored for the first time in Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men (J. Paul Getty Museum, $50), published to accompany a major international exhibition co-organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Musée d’Orsay, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Alongside paintings, drawings, and photographs, as well as an appendix featuring maps and new biographical research that sheds light on Caillebotte’s social network, this volume includes historically grounded thematic essays by curators and leading scholars. By exploring the complex and varied facets of Caillebotte’s societal roles—as son, brother, soldier, bachelor, amateur, sportsman, and so on—these essays pose questions of identity, leaving space for ambiguous and fluid expressions of gender and masculinity, for both Caillebotte and the larger late 19th-century French world.