Caillebotte's Bathing Pictures

Gustave Caillebotte and his Bathing Pictures

Photo of Gustave Caillebotte in approximately 1878 when he was about 30 years old, from Wikipedia.

Gustave Caillebotte was both a member of and a patron of the French Impressionists.

Caillebotte was born in 1848. The French inventor Nicéphore Niépce had created the first photographs in the mid 1820s. Caillebotte was initially interested in photography as an art form. He went on to specialize in oil paintings, but some of his paintings display some characteristics of photographs, as described below.

Caillebotte's family was wealthy. They supported his painting work, and supported his patronage of his fellow artists.

Caillebotte's art collection eventually became the French government's main collection of Impressionist art. It became the core collection of the Musée d'Orsay when that museum was established in 1986, intended to bridge the gap between the older art of the Louvre and the modern and contemporary art in the Centre Pompidou.

Rather than hiring professional models, Caillebotte would pose his friends and family. His mother and a brother having lunch at the family home in Paris, friends playing and watching a card game at a small table, friends rowing small boats on streams and canals on his family's estate at Yerres.

Caillebotte did not constrain himself to the rules of painting as they were understood by the artistic community, both artists and critics. That was especially the case regarding his two paintings of nude bathers.

These photos of some of his works are from a special exhibit organized in 2025 at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Caillebotte attended the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, although he did not participate as an artist.

Caillebotte finished his painting Les raboteurs de parquet or The floor scrapers the following year. Like many of his works, it had a high viewpoint and emphasized the geometry of the scene.

He submitted it to the annual Paris Salon of 1875, but it was rejected. The art establishment considered rustic farmers and peasants to be the only acceptable working-class subjects. This painting depicting urban laborers caused critics and the jurors of the Salon to complain about its "vulgar subject matter".

Les raboteurs de parquet, now in Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

Caillebotte contributed eight paintings to the Second Impressionist Exhibition of 1876. Those included the above painting and another with the same subject. They were displayed alongside Edgar Degas' paintings of washerwomen, which similarly offended the critics.

Caillebotte had studied marine engineering, and so of course he was interested in bridge designs. Le Pont de l'Europe or The Europe Bridge depicts a bridge over the rail yards at Gare Saint-Lazare, one of the large terminal railway stations in Paris. He displayed this at the Third Impressionist Exhibition of 1877.

Le Pont de l'Europe, now in Musée du Petit Palais, Geneva.

A working-class man leans on the railing, watching the activity in the switching yard below. Two well-dressed people, not necessarily a couple, walk toward us. A dog walks away. Other people walk in the background.

Le Pont de l'Europe, now in Musée du Petit Palais, Geneva.

Caillebotte's best-known painting is Rue de Paris, temps de pluie or Paris street, rainy day. It shows several people walking through the Place de Dublin, called the Carrefour de Moscou at the time, a large intersection of broad streets to the east of the Gare Saint-Lazare. It also appeared in the Third Impressionist Exhibition of 1877.

Like Le Pont de l'Europe, it resembles a photograph in several ways. Neither appears like a typical posed painting of the time. Instead it resembles a photograph taken of a busy scene. Some people are only partially visible, especially the distant man near the center who is visible only as a pair of legs. The focal plane seems to be beyond the three figures in the foreground. The light pole and the people walking across the intersection have the sharpest edges. The people in the background become increasingly indistinct with range.

The two people walking together toward the viewpoint might be the same two friends of Caillebotte seen walking across the bridge. They are clearly upper middle class, while the background includes working class people — a maid in a doorway and a man carrying a ladder.

Rue de Paris, temps de pluie, now in the Art Institute of Chicago.

Rue de Paris, temps de pluie resembles a snapshot of a large and complex scene. However, Caillebotte developed individual people and segments of the overall image. The special exhibit had some small studies he did of individual characters, like this oil piece.

Oil study for Rue de Paris, temps de pluie, from a private collection.

Caillebotte was mostly known as a patron and promoter of art rather than a creator. After the Art Institute of Chicago acquired this large painting in 1964, and it was displayed as an introduction into their growing collection of Impressionist pieces, the art world began to better appreciate Caillebotte's skill.

Scenes on Water

Now to move into a more typical topic of this site, Caillebotte's paintings involving water.

Caillebotte's family had a summer home on the Yerres River, near where it flows into the Seine southeast of Paris, just east of where Orly Airport is located today. There were the natural streams of the Seine and the Yerres, along with canals.

Boating and canoeing had become a popular leisure activity among the French upper class. Caillebotte and several of his friends were enthusiasts.

Typical Impressionist painters depicted people in and around boats. But usually the figures were just sitting in boats, often at a distance.

Caillebotte put the viewer right in the boat with someone who was working hard to keep moving, as in his Canotier au chapeau haut de forme or Oarsman in a top hat. Like a photograph, the viewpoint is within the boat. He first showed this in the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition of 1879. The figure is well dressed for a workout, he has removed his jacket but otherwise is rather formally dressed in his vest and top hat.

Oil study for Canotier au chapeau haut de forme, now in Musée d'Orsay.

Caillebotte's Périssoires sur l'Yerres' or, literally, "Perishers" on the Yerres, depicts men in skiffs or flat-bottomed canoes notorious for easily capsizing. Caillebotte and his friends preferred these craft precisely because they were more difficult to manage. At 103.5×155.9 cm, this is one of the largest of the seven boating scenes he completed in 1877–1878 at his family's estate.

Périssoires sur l'Yerres', now in the Milwaukee Art Museum.

The exhibition also had most of Caillebotte's other boating scenes.

Homme au Bain

And now, Caillebotte's bathroom-specific art, presumably the reason you're looking around this site.

Caillebotte painted his Homme au bain or Man at his bath in 1884. It depicts a man who is drying himself off after climbing out of a large metal bathtub. His clothes are folded and stacked on a chair, as he leaves wet footprints on the floor.

Even in an upper-class home in Paris, in the 1880s there probably wouldn't have been a hot water supply built into the house's plumbing. A bath would take preparation, heating water in kettles on a stove.

One of the paintings at the special exhibit in Chicago showed his brother and mother eating lunch, as seen from Gustave's seat at the table. A butler is serving them, the family butler from before the brothers' births until after both parent's deaths. He appeared in several paintings. And, he would be the person who heated the water, and later cleaned out the tub and mopped up the wet mess that this guy left.

Caillebotte sent this work for exhibition in the Les XX show in Brussels in 1888. That show's organizers were thoroughly scandalized, and placed it in a small and inaccessible room. Nude figures appeared in art, of course, but only as mythological figures or, in the case of women, prostitutes. The bare buttocks of Caillebotte's friend were well outside the norm.

Homme au bain', now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

The special exhibit had managed to borrow a related piece, Caillebotte's only other male nude. It depicts the same bathtub in the same room, probably with the same friend as the damp model, Homme s'essuyant la jambe or Man drying his leg. It's horizontal and slightly smaller, 100×125 cm versus 145×114 cm

Homme s'essuyant la jambe, in a private collection.

Caillebotte painted those two male nudes, and his ouvre depicted many (but not exclusively) male friends rowing boats, playing cards, gazing out of upper-floor balconies, and so on. And so, some people conclude that he must have been homosexual. I don't think so because... Gustave Caillebotte had a long-term girlfriend.

Charlotte Berthier was eleven years younger than Gustave, just sixteen years old when he was twenty-seven. But far worse than that, she was of a lower class of society.

Gustave's family simply could not handle the idea of their son falling in love with a woman of a slightly lower class. After multiple family members threw tantrums when they heard of it, he decided to keep seeing her while hiding the relationship from his family. He seems to have been extremely good at that.

She lived with him in Paris after his parents died, and then moved with him to Petit Gennevilliers, where she appears at his place in a census record.

She joined Gustave's other friends as a model in some of his paintings. Below is his circa 1880 Nue sur un canapé. It depicts Charlotte on a late afternoon that was much too hot.

Gustave Caillebotte never tried to show or sell this painting.

Caillebotte left his art collection to the state — sixty-eight paintings, mostly if not entirely Impressionist works. When he died in 1894, the Académie des Beaux-Arts and the rest of the supposed art authorities were no more approving of the Impressionism movement than Caillebotte's family had been of his girlfriend. They did not like Impressionist art.

Caillebotte anticipated that all would be hidden away, so his will stipulated that they be exhibited first at the Luxembourg Palace and then at the Louvre. After negotiations with Renoir, the executor of Caillebotte's will, the government finally accepted just thirty-eight of them to display at the Luxumbourg Palace. That was the first public display of Impressionist art works.

The remaining paintings had been refused. They were offered to the government again in 1904 and then in 1908, but the government refused both times. Finally, in 1928, the government decided that maybe Impressionism was going to catch on after all, and asked for them. The family had had enough of the government's attitude, and refused.

Musée d'Orsay was established in 1986, intended to bridge the gap between the older art of the Louvre and the modern and contemporary art in the Centre Pompidou. The part of Caillebotte's collection that the government had accepted became the core collection of the Musée d'Orsay.