Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men

Edited by Scott Allan, Gloria Groom, and Paul Perrin  

This richly illustrated volume paints a complex portrait of Caillebotte, masculinity, and identity in late nineteenth-century France.

The New York Times "Best Art Books of 2024"

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 The Floor Scrapers, Man at His Bath, Young Man at His Window, Boating Party, and Paris Street, Rainy Day. The originality of his paintings of men is fully explored for the first time in this catalogue, 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 identity—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 nineteenth-century French world.

This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the Musée d’Orsay from October 8, 2024, to January 19, 2025, J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from February 25 to May 25, 2025, and The Art Institute of Chicago from June 29 to October 5, 2025.

Scott Allan is curator in the Department of Paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Gloria Groom is chair of European painting and sculpture and David and Mary Winton Green Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. Paul Perrin is chief curator, head of curatorial and director of collections at the Musée d'Orsay.

“This book takes Impressionism from the other side, and its inquiry into crises and reinventions of masculinity has a jolting relevance.”
—The New York Times 

“Gustave Caillebotte remains the most mysterious core member of the Impressionist movement. This catalogue includes the latest scholarship on the artist by contemporary experts in the field—museum and academic art historians based in France and the United States—bringing fresh readings to Caillebotte’s known work as well as investigations of several paintings only recently arrived in the public sphere. It is spectacularly illustrated with the best of the artist’s oeuvre, definitively establishing the striking singularity of Caillebotte’s artistic achievement.”
—Mary Morton, Curator of French Paintings, National Gallery of Art

“The essays inside this beautifully illustrated catalogue offer groundbreaking insights into a dominant, if largely ignored, theme in Caillebotte’s work. A major contribution to the existing scholarship on the artist, this book will be a standard reference for years to come.”
—Marnin Young, author of Realism in the Age of Impressionism: Painting and the Politics of Time

“Accompanying a major international loan exhibition, Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men offers a fascinating array of essays that explore complex questions of masculinity and virility in the art of this still enigmatic painter. The book features the wisdom of many seasoned scholars of Impressionism, but it is also noteworthy for the contributions of a new generation of authors, whose fresh eyes and new voices help bring the artist’s world vividly to life.”
—George T. M. Shackelford, Deputy Director, Kimbell Art Museum

264 pages
9 1/2 x 11 inches
195 color illustrations
ISBN 978-1-60606-944-8
hardcover

Getty Publications 
Imprint: J. Paul Getty Museum + The Art Institute of Chicago

2024