Painting Modern Men: Caillebotte at the Musée d'Orsay

Long the quiet man of Impressionism, Gustave Caillebotte stepped into the spotlight with the Musée d'Orsay's 2024 exhibition 'Caillebotte: Painting Men'. Wealthy enough to support his friends Monet and Renoir, he was also a sharp painter in his own right.

His cool, precise canvases — rain-slicked Paris boulevards, workers scraping a floor, oarsmen and boulevardiers — captured the modern city with an almost photographic eye, and an unusual focus on the men who moved through it.

The show invited fresh readings of his work and of masculinity itself, cementing Caillebotte as far more than a footnote to the Impressionists he so generously championed.

Image: “Gustave Caillebotte - Paris Street; Rainy Day - Google Art Project” — Gustave Caillebotte, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.