Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World, at The Art Institute, Chicago is proof positive that finally, the modernist French artist is receiving the recognition he deserves. In fact, one of his paintings – The Floor Scrapers – is so mesmerising that a friend of mine who once spent a summer in Paris went virtually every day to the Musée d’Orsay to see it. It is that mesmerising.”
However, when the artist first painted this hypnotic study of three sinuous workmen planing the floor of his studio in Paris, it was widely scorned. In 1875, France’s most prestigious art exhibition, the Salon, dismissed it out of hand. The jurors were outraged by this portrayal of semi-dressed working-class people, deriding it as “vulgar subject matter”.
Now, most people see the painting as a stone-cold masterpiece. Underscoring Caillebotte’s fascination with working people, it is a spellbinding, deeply moving illustration of men at labour.
The picture features in the exhibition Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World, at The Art Institute, Chicago (*). Including more than 120 works – paintings, works on paper, photographs and other ephemera from throughout Caillebotte’s career – the show charts why this previously underrated painter deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as his more celebrated friends and peers: Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro.
Left: Gustave Caillebotte. Balcony, c. 1880. Private collection. Photo courtesy of the private collection/Bridgeman Images.
Right: Gustave Caillebotte. Boating Party, c. 1877–78. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo courtesy of GrandPalaisRmn (Musée d’Orsay) / Sophie Crépy.
In an era when painters focused on modish young women and glitzy new forms of entertainment, Caillebotte concentrated instead on a more personal, intimate realm: his family and friends, sportsmen, the bourgeois folk wandering about his neighbourhood, and the workmen who visited his house.
In his preoccupation with down-to-earth citizens, Caillebotte was something of a revolutionary at the time. As Adrien Meyer, Global Head of Private Sales and Co-Head of Impressionist and Modern Art at Christie’s, puts it: “He was a modernist, a realist, a rule-breaker. He was a daring artist and broke boundaries.”
The result of this groundbreaking approach was such timeless pictures of ordinary Parisiens as Boating Party (1877-8), Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877) and In a Café (1880) – all of which can be admired in this show.
After seeing this wondrous exhibition, most people will doubtless agree with my friend that Caillebotte is quite simply a sublime artist.
Author: James Rampton
Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World
The Art Institute Chicago
111 South Michigan Av. Chicago, Illinois 60603
29th June – 5th October 2025
More information and tickets, HERE.
Lead image: Gustave Caillebotte. Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877. The Art Institute of Chicago, Charles H. and Mary F. Worcester Collection.
(*) Unfortunately images of The Floor Scrappers were not available to the press. You can see the painting on the website of the Musée d’Orsay.
Another unmissable show in Chicago: City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago.
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