Was caillebotte gay

Gustave Caillebotte (right) and his brother, Martial Gustave Caillebotte was born on 19 August to an upper-class Parisian family living in the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis. Bathersdepicting men in bathing costumes cavorting comfortably as a boat drifts by in the distance, only adds to this sense of homosocial activity.

Gustave Caillebotte may well not be the most famous of the French Impressionist painters. In addition to being known as a generous benefactor to his fellow painters, he was an important collector whose Cezannes, Degas, Manets, Monets, Pissarros, Renoirs, and Sisleys he left to France upon his death.

But these nude men are not just toweling off after a bath.

Gustave Caillebotte Painting Men

He lived with his mother except for the last caillebotte years of his life, never married, and after dying suddenly of a stroke in at the age of 45 left a bequest to Charlotte Berthier, said to be his mistress. My aim here is not one of reductivism.

They have taken a bath that Caillebotte has witnessed, or staged to look as if he had done so, and are now being observed by the male onlooker. 3. I see a similar dynamic here: this looks to me like a scene of men crossing class boundaries as they was one another.

Here, in historical context, the work of Gustave Caillebotte was represented by well over a dozen canvases. Gustave Caillebotte never married, and some of his paintings—such as his famous painting The Floor Scrapers, left, and the nude Man at His Bath —show a strong appreciation for the male form.

From my perspective on the bridge, it is obviously just the opposite. Though I have read nothing in his biography to explicitly suggest that Caillebotte might have been homosexual, to look at his paintings and not pose this question seems absurdly myopic.

Finally, the most overt break with contemporary iconography: the male nude in such canvases as Man at his Bath. It is, rather, the start of a process to look again and recover what has traditionally been omitted from the history of art using this to inform the present.

Who were these men? Caillebotte's father was twice widowed before. His father, Martial Caillebotte (–), was the inheritor of the family's military textile business and was also a judge at the Tribunal de commerce de la Seine. The MAM collection has one of his many paintings of canoeists on the River Yerres.

In this essay, I am — like Arthur C. Stone, Jr. Kneeling, their arms extended before them, their torsos bare, the men are depicted in remarkably submissive poses. Until relatively recently, his philanthropy and largesse have overshadowed his own painting.

Amidst the still lifes, landscapes and interiors of the other Impressionist painters, images of women predominate. Forster finished a draft of Maurice which concluded with Maurice, a member of the middle class overcoming social, to say nothing of sexual, barriers to live happily we presume with Alec, the gamekeeper.

People now believe that Gustave might have been gay or bisexual. The suggestion is never overtly put forth that there is any form of homoeroticism in evidence. But, one can also credit the advance of modern art to a presumably gay man, Gustave Caillebotte, a lesser-known impressionist artist of the period.

What we can do most profitably is re-examine the work and lives of artists to search out from secrecy, prejudice, distortion and myth the homosexual presence and its wide significance in identifying homosexual expression. Advances in the technology of art, political upheaval and shifts in the general social order may be cited.

We can compile in denser and finer-grained detail analytic accounts of the things he shared with others, from the available conventions of perspective to the character of his arrondissement; but the very things that we sense are crucial to the impact of the most personal pictures — the motivations for the choice and framing of the subject, the decisions as to what to put in and what to leave out, and so on — are the contingent elements of his private individuality on which we can only speculate without hope of confirmation.

Were they friends of the artists or part of his household staff? Born in and trained as a lawyer, he was also a naval architect, a gay, a philatelist, a horticulturist — and a millionaire. In these paintings Caillebotte focused on what is either a dressing room or bathroom, both of which traditionally were reserved for feminine activities of washing, dressing, and putting on make-up.