A painter once thought peculiar, he’s now the deserving subject of Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men at the Art Institute of Chicago.

G reetings from Chicago and its splendid Art Institute, where Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men is in its last month here after a run at the Musée d’Orsay and the Getty. Caillebotte (1848–1894) is the Impressionist paradox. His work is cerebral and cool, emotional but only on simmer, hot and sweaty but there’s never a dip too far away. Consciously modern like Monet, Renoir, Degas, and others among the renegade movement, he spiced his paintings with views of his subjects, mostly men, from behind, from startlingly high or low points of view or up close to the point of weird immersion: men at work, men at play, men fresh from the tub, and men as flâneurs. He’s brilliant at painting water and had a way with lush, cool, calm brushstrokes. He’s the new master of the Old Master tradition of dazzling reflections.

In a short time, only twenty years, he did close to 600 paintings and exhibited in five of the eight Impressionist salons. Still, until the 1990s, while not unknown — his mammoth Paris Street; Rainy Day anchors the Art Institute’s famous Impressionist galleries — Caillebotte wasn’t cherished, much less plumbed. Too cryptic, too peculiar, too many men and the wrong kind of men.

For all of these qualities, I tell people, “If there’s a Caillebotte show, absolutely run, don’t walk, to see it.” Painting Men reigns transcendent in the Art Institute’s galleries, shows many pictures in private hands, has context in the museum’s other, stellar Impressionists, and displays nearly all his best work.

Painting Men is mostly chronological and starts with Caillebotte’s family scenes. This makes sense, in part, since Caillebotte lived on family money. Though educated as both a lawyer and an engineer, he was freed from office work and from catering to the marketplace. He studied art with Léon Bonnat, conservative but with an edge. Caillebotte learned fast. Luncheon from 1876 depicts his mother and brother, René, having lunch at a polished, round, dark mahogany table packed with gleaming cut glass. Caillebotte’s father has just died so his mother’s in black, tucked in the upper left-hand corner of the painting and serving herself from a platter presented by her longtime butler. Caillebotte’s brother chows down, either oblivious or practicing the art of escape. The painting is from the artist’s viewpoint across the table from his mother. The artist is unseen — he looks, or floats — and his plate, knife on its knife rest, and gigantic glass of wine are his surrogates.

It’s a dark, Victorian scene oozing anxiety, and anxiety is a better hook for a show than most. By 1878, René was dead, and so was Caillebotte’s mother. Caillebotte was now very rich. He was close to his remaining brother and his family, had at least one longtime mistress, and developed a circle of men friends. He painted, gardened, went sailing — he owned over 30 boats and was an oarsman and sailor extraordinaire — and supported the arts, especially the Impressionists. He died young, at 45, and didn’t leave much of a paper trail. He didn’t get a retrospective until 1994.

All of these things, and having left nearly 600 paintings, makes him one of art history’s late bloomers and a gold mine.

Caillebotte’s three strokes of genius and eternal fame come early in Floor Scrapers from 1875, Young Man at His Window in 1876, and Paris Street; Rainy Day in 1877. Floor Scrapers normally lives at the Musée d’Orsay and doesn’t travel much since it’s a marquee picture. That’s enough reason in itself to see the exhibition in Chicago. Three sweaty, wiry workers are refinishing the floor of what would become Caillebotte’s studio, located in the family house.

At 40 by 57 inches, Floor Scrapers is a heap of painting. As with the table in Luncheon, Caillebotte exaggerates the room’s tilt so the workers seem about to slide into our space. That would dismantle the boundary between the worker’s world and the art lover’s. Whether Caillebotte’s figures or the tromp l’oeil wood shavings, it’s an intensely realistic painting, too much for some critics and, without pastel colors and fuzzy contours, not standard Impressionism, except that part and parcel of Impressionism is a new realism of subject matter. It’s not the exactitude and finish of, say, the older painters Gérôme or Bouguereau. Rather, it’s a new look at real life. After the German invasion, after the Paris Commune, with the empire out and the republic in, Caillebotte projects a new France based on solidarity rather than France cleaved by class resentment.

When Caillebotte submitted Floor Scrapers to the official Paris salon in 1875, jurors rejected it as too vulgar. Peasants in art were fine, but urban workers, and workers stripped to the waist, weren’t. Miffed, he sent it to the second Impressionist salon a year later, where it made a splash. Caillebotte’s technique wasn’t far from Academic, linear and crisply finished, but his subjects were at home with the other apostates.

Young Man at His Window, which Caillebotte showed along with Floor Scrapers, depicts Caillebotte’s brother looking out the third-floor window of the Caillebotte family’s lux home, toward sunlit rue de Lisbonne. In 2021, the Getty bought it at auction for $53 million from the estate of the Dallas oil magnate Edwin Cox, making the Getty an obvious partner for the Art Institute and the Musée d’Orsay in Painting Men. René was a bit of a dandy. In this picture, is he a beacon of languor or of restlessness, or has he spotted the elegantly dressed young woman below? Rich and young, he has the world at his feet. He stands with what seems like confidence, but is it smug rather than relaxed confidence? It’s an enigma. Caillebotte paints single figures looking from balconies a few times. When the figure is a woman, she’s always demurely obscured by curtains.

The very beautiful Young Man at the Piano, from 1876, shows Caillebotte’s other brother, Martial, playing the piano in the rue de Lisbonne house. Martial was then a composer in training at Paris’s premier music school. Three brothers, three lives, three takes.

Paris Street; Rainy Day was in the 1877 third Impressionist salon in a gallery with seven Monet Gare Saint-Lazare pictures and seems to have stolen the room if not the show. Its nearly life-size scene of well-dressed strollers in a ritzy new neighborhood near Gare Saint-Lazare is a convincing snapshot of fashion, city planning, weather, habits, and hierarchy. The central woman’s hat, fur-lined coat, veil, and diamond earring and her companion’s topcoat, top hat, and bow tie, along with their poise, tell us they’re haute bourgeois and a pair we could have seen on the Upper East Side in a more formal age not too long ago. The setting is the Paris as renovated by Baron Haussmann, with the medieval slums cleared, boulevards laid, and chic townhouses built. We see tiny workers and servants tucked in doorways. It’s not Renoir’s Paris, bustling and in brilliant sunshine. It’s wintry, monochromatic Paris.

Since serious Caillebotte studies started in the 1990s, Paris Street; Rainy Day has been said to show the ultimate flâneur. That’s the well-heeled man, not very much in need of a day job, walking with nonchalance, studying modern life, its social types, and its quirks. Balzac called the flâneur’s gleanings “the gastronomy of the eye.” Baudelaire called the flâneur an “artist-poet,” Paris’s modern sage, whether he could paint or rhyme. The new Paris, intellectually and socially, belonged to him and especially to millionaires like Caillebotte. You can be a poor flâneur, but that might make you a social climber or a loafer. Still, much of modern French art concerned his observations and interests, on the street or at home.

Gloria Groom, the Art Institute’s longtime French paintings curator, has looked at Paris Street; Rainy Day for years. In her essay, she calls Caillebotte “the anti-flâneur,” emphasizing how empty — it’s all relative — Caillebotte’s streets are. Pictures like Young Man at His Window are flâneur scenes but place the observer and chronicler on a superior perch. She also notes that by 1883 or so, Caillebotte was spending less and less time in Paris and turning to interiors, portraits, and his sporting scenes. In 1888, he moved to Petit Gennevilliers, at the time countryside along the Seine outside Paris. He was a flâneur no more.

This is my one quibble with Painting Men: Caillebotte’s had two retrospectives in 30 years, the last one at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth in 2015. What’s new to say? The catalogue tries to situate Caillebotte in a crisis of masculinity in the 1870s stemming from France’s defeat in the war with the Prussians, a stirring women’s lib movement, a new economy’s primacy of office work rather than work requiring strength, the decline of traditional male values like conviction, vigor, courage, and irascibility, and, overall, a diminishment of fraternité, that third leg in French national identity. Piles of new dissertations and journal articles on Caillebotte and gender and repressed sexuality, the curators tell us, merit a big, new exhibition.

Do they? I’m not convinced and don’t care. It’s Caillebotte.

I don’t think there’s much new to say about Caillebotte’s Boating Party from 1877–78, another star picture, which has pride of place in the show and introduces its “Sportsman” gallery. The French Republic bought it from Caillebotte’s family for $47 million in 2023 and touted it as honoring Impressionism’s 150th birthday in 2024. We don’t know who the model was, but he’s got marquee looks. His high-style dress, top hat, buttoned vest, and striped shirt tell us he’s rich and a man of leisure but also a man of action, a dynamo fitting time on the water into a busy schedule that might include a stint as Superman. Unlike the Schuylkill River rowing pictures by Thomas Eakins, Caillebotte puts us in the boat instead of looking at it. His subject’s muscles flex and strain. He’s part thoroughbred, part Poseidon, part Gene Kelly.

Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881), the zenith of the genre of Impressionist boating scenes, features Caillebotte in the foreground, but these scenes are about fun, fun, fun, flirtation, and fashion. Caillebotte’s water pictures are more often about strength, discipline, and, when we see two men in a skiff, collective effort. A surprising triptych from 1878, titled Skiffs, Bathers, and Angling, shows how Caillebotte kept pushing himself. He likely intended them to go together as decorative panels, a new trick for him. They’ve got a social aspect but are still, basically, about prowess. They’ve been separated since the 1870s but are together again and look splendid.

In marketing Painting Men, the Getty ever so slightly suggested that Caillebotte’s many paintings of men might mean he was attracted to men in a love-that-dares-not-speak-its-name way. Lots of European critics wailed, claiming the Americans were queering Caillebotte, gender-and-identity-crazed that we are.

In their catalogue essay, Andre Dombrowski and Jonathan Katz, in treating Man at His Bath, which emphasizes the rosy pink buttocks of a man drying himself, and the unfinished Man Drying His Leg, both from 1884, demur on whether or not Caillebotte was closeted. Instead, they note that homosexuality as a concept — a core characteristic rather than an act — was new in France. In looking at male nudes as frank as these, men stare or gape or linger as men have done since the days of Titian and Giorgione when looking at female nudes. Even a straight man’s gaze is thus subtly sexualized. It’s another twist Caillebotte brings to the table.

The riches go on and on. Caillebotte’s portraits of men and women are seriously good. Accompanying Paris Street; Rainy Day and Floor Scrapers are a slew of preparatory drawings. Family photographs are abundant. Caillebotte was a good dog painter, too. One or two are canine flâneurs at heart.

In the last gallery, we’re left to wonder what would have been next for the artist living outside Paris, spending lots of time on his boats and his garden, the Impressionist salons now bygone. His last was the seventh, in 1882. He wasn’t in the eighth and final one in 1886. Caillebotte and Degas were the Impressionist salons’ organizers and visionaries, and Caillebotte was their anchor donor.

I think Caillebotte the artist was infinitely energized by the avant-garde salons and his moments in the schismatic spotlight. Once that time was over, he seems not lost but focused on other things. His art became certainly quieter, more random, and less linear. His landscapes were impressions and far more painterly, and they seem close, in his handling of paint, to work by Pissarro and Monet from the 1880s. An 1886 painting of Caillebotte’s lush garden of pink roses includes Charlotte Berthier, probably his mistress. What’s thought to be his last self-portrait is a small bust in sailor gear. In the years before his sudden death, he’d complained to friends in letters that he no longer understood the Paris art market, a sign he might have considered his time as an artist done.

As a critic, and, possibly, the rare critic who actually reads exhibition catalogues, I think the book’s well designed and beautiful. As is nearly universally the case now, the meaty art history’s in the book not in the gallery interpretation, which pitches to art appreciators and tourists. I wish museums would bet on the intelligence of their audience and give them the serious scholarship. What’s there isn’t bad and is never inane, but a higher octane would challenge visitors and be consistent with Caillebotte’s work, which isn’t just easy on the eyes.

Painting Men is up to the Art Institute’s very high standards. It’s a sensual and intellectual feast.