Caillebotte: This Is Modern Paris

You won't find a single work of art by Gustave Caillebotte in a British public collection. And yet he's one of the key figures in the Impressionist movement, whose 150th anniversary we're celebrating this year. But over in Paris, he's the subject of a big, big exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay; we jumped on the Eurostar to see it, and, even though Caillebotte: Painting Men was the most crowded show we'd been to in quite some time, we absolutely adored it. 

And let's start with perhaps the pièce de résistance. Even if you don't know Caillebotte at all, you may have seen this image before; there's something about it that encapsulates late 19th-century Paris, with its view of an intersection between the broad new streets pushed through by that radical city-planner, Baron Haussmann, lined by elegant new buildings. This was the modern city, the modern world.

Paris Street; Rainy Day: a painting in which there's nothing really happening, and there's not much in the way of colour, but there's so much to see. You find your eye drawn to the rain that's puddling between the cobbles and the shadows cast by the black-clad people braving this dismal day. Those umbrellas, too, and the audacious cropping of the image. It's the largest canvas ever painted by Caillebotte, and it dominated the 1877 Impressionist exhibition. 

Unlike many in the Impressionist movement who struggled to make ends meet from their art, Caillebotte came from a prosperous background. He was wealthy enough to be able to support artists like Manet, Monet and Renoir by buying their work, and the core of the collection he amassed is now actually in the Musée d'Orsay. He's one of them too, not so much in the style of his painting -- there are not a lot of Caillebottes that have that feel of fleeting, sketchy brushwork -- but in his view of modern life.   

Modern man looking at modern Paris. In fact, this is Caillebotte's brother René looking out from the window of the family mansion on Rue de Miromesnil in the 8th arrondissement. 

And here's René again, tackling lunch in the Caillebotte home. The butler serves their mother, and it's a picture of prosperity. 

But also such an unusual point of view, with Gustave's plate cropped at the bottom of the image and the glassware almost concealing much of what the others are eating. Caillebotte liked disconcerting and daring angles, new viewpoints on this new lifestyle that Parisians were leading. 

Such as the functional new architecture of this bridge -- the Pont de l'Europe -- close to the family home over the tracks leading out of the Gare Saint-Lazare. The passers-by and the man looking down on the railway below are second fiddle to the pattern of the steelwork behind which a puff of white indicates a steam engine just outside the station roof.   

There's another view of The Pont de l'Europe in this show as well, this time featuring a man and a woman in rather ambiguous circumstances. The man is a self-portrait of Caillebotte, but the elegantly dressed woman is walking just behind him. Is she a prostitute who's just accosted him? Or is that reading too much into it? 

Yes, it's time to talk about sex. This show is called Caillebotte: Painting Men, and there aren't many women in it. In fact, he painted many more men than women in his career. He never married; he did live with a woman, younger and from a lower class, called Charlotte Berthier, but they had no children. So all these men, rather than women, in his pictures. The premise throughout this show seems to be, without more than a suggestion of circumstantial evidence, that Caillebotte might have been attracted to men rather than women. 

Much is made of this painting in particular, an unusual male nude that was shocking enough to be relegated to a back room when exhibited in Brussels in 1888. 

But might not Caillebotte, clearly an artist with a taste for the unconventional, have thought that since Edgar Degas was always painting women drying themselves after a bath, he might for the sheer hell of it have a go at a man doing the same? And quite frankly, Caillebotte's female Nude on a Couch in this show -- never exhibited while he was alive -- is rather more provocative than the male bather, though he may have taken longer painting the couch than the sitter, or more accurately the recliner, in this case. 

Anyway, here's some more sweaty, half-naked men indulging in behaviour that many in the late 19th-century French bourgeoisie would have regarded as being unsuitable for a painting: Caillebotte's Floor Scrapers. 

Ah, French workmen.... no mugs of tea and packet of biscuits for these lads, they've got a bottle of red on the go to help them through what must have been a horrible job, getting all that old varnish off the floors. This isn't the only Caillebotte picture to ennoble the working man.... there are also shopfront painters taking as much pride in their work as any artist at an easel. 

But before we head out of the city, let's get one more unusual view of the goings-on out of one of those apartment windows, almost vertically down onto the street; an unprecedented angle, the sort nobody had painted before Caillebotte. In this modern Paris, the newly planted tree on a new boulevard, surrounded by a grating, and with a newly installed bench alongside. A horse-drawn carriage appears to wait for a passenger. 

Caillebotte didn't just paint the people on the streets of the city or in their apartments; a large part of his work depicts people messing about in boats. He was a huge enthusiast, particularly of sailing, and a boat designer in his own right. These open-air pictures are, perhaps, a little more Impressionistic, a little more in line with what you might see from his contemporaries. 

Take the reflections on the water of the paddles wielded by these canoeists in their Skiffs, the broad brushstrokes of yellow paint. 

And of course, with Caillebotte, you're always looking at things from that odd viewpoint. So it is in Partie de bateau, where you are in the boat with the oarsman, clad not in rowing gear but in his suit like a city gent. He's taken off the jacket, but he's kept on his top hat. And what a great blue striped shirt (we were hoping to find one in the exhibition shop, but alas, it's a sales opportunity missed).  

Caillebotte: Painting Men: The "was-Caillebotte-gay?" premise is a bit irritating, but otherwise this may be the most enjoyable exhibition we've seen this year. 

Practicalities

Caillebotte: Painting Men is on at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris until January 19. The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday from 0930 to 1800, with late opening on Thursday until 2145. You'd be well advised to reserve a time slot for this exhibition and book a ticket for the museum online here; full-price tickets to the Orsay's permanent collection and all exhibitions are 16 euros, but it's only 12 euros after 1800 on Thursdays and free on the first Sunday of the month. We spent a good two hours in this show. 

And programme in another half an hour for a trip to the top floor of the museum, where for the duration of the exhibition, all of the Impressionist-era works bequeathed by Caillebotte to the French state have been gathered together. It's quite a collection. Among the highlights: Claude Monet's Saint-Lazare Station, Edouard Manet's The Balcony, and Auguste Renoir's Dance at the Moulin de la Galette and The Swing. 

The Musée d'Orsay is on the south bank of the River Seine just across from the Tuileries gardens and the Louvre, and it has its own station on line C of the RER suburban-rail network. Solférino station on line 12 of the Metro is also close by.

Images

Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894), Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877, Art Institute of Chicago 
Gustave Caillebotte, Young Man at his Window, 1876, The J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gustave Caillebotte, Lunch, 1876, Private collection
Gustave Caillebotte, On the Pont de l'Europe, 1876-77, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth 
Gustave Caillebotte, Man at his Bath, 1884, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 
Gustave Caillebotte, The Floor Scrapers, 1875, Musée d'Orsay, Paris 
Gustave Caillebotte, Boulevard Seen from Above, 1880, Private collection

Gustave Caillebotte, Skiffs, 1877, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Gustave Caillebotte, Partie de bateau, c. 1877-78, Musée d'Orsay, Paris