Gustave Caillebotte Exhibition Explores the Artist’s Fascination with Masculinity

The J. Paul Getty Museum presents Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men, an exhibition featuring about 100 paintings and drawings by French Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894).

On view at the Getty Center from February 25 to May 25, 2025, this is the largest display of Caillebotte’s work on the West Coast in 30 years.

Organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, and Musée d’Orsay, Paris, the exhibition offers a revealing window into Caillebotte’s world as a wealthy and fiercely independent bourgeois for whom avant-garde painting was one of many pursuits. While counterparts like Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas primarily painted women, Caillebotte distinguished himself by focusing intently on men, from family members and close friends to anonymous workers, sportsmen, and soldiers.

“Exceptional for their immersive compositions and energetic execution, Gustave Caillebotte’s paintings raise fascinating questions about gender norms and masculinity in 19th-century France and continue to spark discussion and debate today,” says Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the Getty Museum. “We are delighted to partner with the Musée d’Orsay and the Art Institute of Chicago to bring to the West Coast many of Caillebotte’s most compelling and famous paintings in a display that highlights his originality while situating him in biographical, social, and historical context.”

Presented thematically, the exhibition opens with Caillebotte’s family life, the subject of his first important paintings, shown in his public debut with the Impressionists in 1876. Getty’s recently acquired Young Man at His Window depicts the artist’s younger brother René gazing out on the street from the family’s Paris mansion and is a prime example of what critic Edmond Duranty characterized as “The New Painting”—a bold, realist art that portrayed modern individuals in their everyday environments.

Caillebotte’s wealth, stemming from his late father’s textile business and real estate investments, enabled him to pursue an independent artistic career unburdened by commercial pressures. He nonetheless approached painting with an intense work ethic and identified strongly with working men. His early masterpiece Floor Scrapers, which shows lean, shirtless men finishing the floors of his studio, introduced the figure of the urban laborer into modern French painting.

Inspired by the modern transformation of Paris, Caillebotte began painting his surrounding neighborhood and its uniform apartment blocks, wide avenues, and busy intersections. On view is the Art Institute of Chicago’s monumental Paris Street, Rainy Day, which features an intersection Caillebotte traversed routinely and shows his interest in how fellow Parisians, bourgeois men in particular, occupied and navigated their new urban environment. Complementing his street-level views are innovative balcony scenes showing men surveying the city from above.

Caillebotte countered his depictions of men on the street with intimate portraits of his male friends in domestic interiors, often his own apartment. Capturing the artist’s affluent companions is The Bezique Game, a card-playing scene that doubles as a group portrait. The scene features Caillebotte’s brother Martial along with friends like Richard Gallo and Paul Hugot, who are also the subjects of independent portraits in the exhibition.

In dialogue with Caillebotte’s bachelor portraits are unsentimental scenes of bourgeois couples that suggest a skeptical attitude toward marriage and confining gender norms. In a wry reversal of stereotypical roles, Interior, Woman Reading foregrounds a woman seated upright reading a newspaper, typically viewed as a man’s activity at the time, while her male partner reclines on a sofa and immerses himself in a novel, assuming an activity deemed more feminine.

Also on view are some rare depictions of soldiers, illustrating how Caillebotte’s concept of masculinity was informed by the military, where he served during the Franco-Prussian War and subsequently in the reserve. Similarly, pictures of athletic boating men, a novel subject in painting at the time, speak to the artist’s passion for the emerging sport as he became a highly competitive yachtsman. Among several highlights is the Musée d’Orsay’s recently acquired Boating Party, a painting deemed a “national treasure” by the French Ministry of Culture.

While Caillebotte rarely painted nudes, a few striking examples are on display, including the large-scale Man at His Bath, which shows a naked man vigorously toweling off after a bath. At a time when artists typically featured female bathers, Caillebotte intentionally masculinized the genre. When Caillebotte exhibited Man at His Bath in 1888 at Les XX in Brussels, it shocked viewers and was isolated in a small side room.

“Caillebotte was a great innovator both in his highly personal choice of subjects and his powerful presentation of them,” says Scott Allan, curator of paintings at the Getty Museum. “He was unusually curious about the men in his world, showing them in public and private, indoors and out, at work, play and rest, in various modes of dress, and from all kinds of riveting angles and viewpoints. He really broadened the scope of modern painting, and his work productively challenges our clichéd understandings of the Impressionist movement.”

Caillebotte never married but, in his final years, lived with Charlotte Berthier, a longtime companion who rarely appeared in his art. He died at 45 years old and left his collection of paintings by his fellow Impressionists to the French State. While a selection of those works went to the Musée de Luxembourg before eventually forming the core of the Musée d’Orsay’s Impressionist collection, Caillebotte’s own paintings were retained by his brother Martial and by a few friends. His work was largely unknown until major institutions began exhibiting his art in the second half of the 20th century, establishing his place as a key figure of the Impressionist movement.

Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men was curated by Scott Allan, curator of paintings at the Getty Museum, Gloria Groom, chair of painting and sculpture of Europe and David and Mary Winton Green curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Paul Perrin, director of collections and conservation at Musée d’Orsay. The curators co-edited the richly illustrated catalog, Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men, featuring 10 thematic essays by curators and leading scholars.

The exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. Generous support was provided by City National Bank and Gregory Annenberg Weingarten, GRoW @ Annenberg. Cultural Partners of the exhibition include Consulat Général de France à Los Angeles and Villa Albertine.

Following its display at Getty, the exhibition will be on view at the Art Institute of Chicago from June 29 to October 5, 2025.