Staging Modern Life: Gustave Caillebotte’s Radical Genre Paintings

This guiding principle, expressed by the art critic Edmond Duranty in his 1867 essay The New Painting, is that art should move beyond depictions of distant historical, biblical, and mythological events and toward showing people going about their everyday lives. In the early stages of his career, it was this choice of subject matter, more than style or technique, that aligned Gustave Caillebotte with the Impressionist movement.

Caillebotte began his artistic career at the traditional École des Beaux-Arts, and although he often worked in a more Realist style and with a higher degree of finish than one typically associates with Impressionism, his portrayals of his own experiences of modern Parisian life were not acceptable to the art establishment. His first and only submission to the official Salon, Floor Scrapers, featuring urban workers preparing the floor of his home studio, was rejected—ostensibly for its subject matter, which was seen as vulgar and unworthy of commemorating in a painting. Thereafter he began exhibiting exclusively with the Impressionists.

The idea, the first idea, was to take away the partition separating the studio from everyday life … and to bring [the painter] out among men, into the world …

—Edmond Duranty, The New Painting, 1867

While Caillebotte’s early street scenes contain mostly anonymous figures drawn from observations made on his daily walks, the people of his interiors are almost all identifiable as close associates of the artist, and there is no evidence that he ever hired professional models for his work. Most of these interior scenes are straightforward portraits, but two of them from 1880, Interior, Woman at the Window and Interior, Woman Reading, demonstrate the artist’s radical experiments with genre scenes, or paintings depicting fleeting moments of everyday life. 

Both of these paintings depict a bourgeois couple in a domestic setting, each immersed in their own activities. Details identify this location as the boulevard Haussmann apartment Caillebotte shared with his younger brother Martial. The silvery blue walls with gilt molding appear in the majority of his portraits, and the decorative iron balcony and lace-edged curtains in Woman at the Window can also be seen in Portrait of a Man. The floral sofa in Woman Reading is likewise a recurring character in several paintings, most notably Nude on a Couch. 

The man in both Interior, Woman at the Window and Interior, Woman Reading has been identified as Richard Gallo, a close friend of Caillebotte’s who sat for the artist many times. Although Gallo himself was a lifelong bachelor, Caillebotte cast him in the role of husband in these domestic scenes. The woman has not been definitively identified, but it is theorized that she could be Charlotte Berthier, a young Parisian woman who was Caillebotte’s companion until the end of his life and of whom we have very little record of today.

Woman at the Window and Woman Reading were both painted to feature in the fifth Impressionist exhibition in 1880, which was poorly received as a whole. By this time, divisions between the core members of the Impressionist group had begun in earnest—particularly between Caillebotte and Degas—and the largely negative reviews did not help matters. Both paintings were exhibited with the neutral title Interior, which provided little indication as to the narrative of the paintings (their descriptive titles were added later). And although there is no visual evidence in either painting, in the 19th century the context of a bourgeois man and woman alone in a domestic setting implied they were a married couple, and this is the assumption that viewers and critics made. 

Of the two interiors, Woman at the Window received a much warmer reception, the critic Joris-Karl Huysmans going so far as to call it a “masterpiece.” You can see Caillebotte experimenting with the depiction of interior and exterior space; he has greatly compressed the scene so that the planes of the man in the armchair, the woman at the window, and the façade of the building across the street appear to be incredibly close together. The couple seems bored, the man reading the newspaper and the woman staring listlessly out the window. And yet the atmosphere of the room feels faintly charged. 

The scene was praised for its sense of reality, although it was a staged scene. Huysmans in particular was taken by the portrayal of the woman, writing “… if you touch her with your finger, she will yawn, turn around, exchange an empty phrase with her husband who is hardly interested in reading the news … It is a moment of contemporary life, fixed as such.” Some, however, thought the composition disappointing. In addition to finding the gold lettering of the Hotel Canterbury across the street distracting, many disliked that the man was partially cut out of the frame, shifting the focus and narrative power to the woman.

Caillebotte’s willingness to play with gender hierarchies is even more apparent in Woman Reading, which greatly contributed to its overwhelmingly negative response. The round-cheeked woman takes up much of the foreground, looming over the small man in the background despite the compression of space. One critic described it as a “sideshow at a fair,” writing “Come see the little dwarf and the giant lady!” Another wrote that given the couple’s vastly different sizes, divorce seemed inevitable. Beyond this exaggerated difference in scale, Caillebotte added several details that subvert the accepted gender hierarchy: The woman sits upright in a wooden chair reading the newspaper, a pastime that was considered to be masculine, while the man reclines on a sofa and reads a novel, both of which were thought of as feminine behaviors. Although these details may seem subtle to today’s audiences, those in 19th-century France saw them as plainly subversive. 

From the very beginning of his career, Caillebotte demonstrated a willingness to invert the expected gender roles of his time—even an interest in doing so. Much of his work focused exclusively on men, which was itself unusual, and within these paintings he often showed the men engaged in activities typically relegated to women, including reading novels, playing the piano, and staring dreamily out of windows. In the instances that he painted men and women together, particularly Interior, Woman Reading and Interior, Woman at the Window, Caillebotte intentionally created ambiguous narratives that encapsulate his provocative expressions of modern life. Caillebotte’s genre scenes stand out for their open-ended storytelling, encouraging viewers to engage their imaginations.

—Megan True, curatorial assistant, Painting and Sculpture of Europe

Sponsors

Lead support for Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World is generously provided by the John D. and Alexandra C. Nichols Family Foundation.

Lead Corporate Sponsor

Major support is provided by the Butler Family Foundation, Richard F. and Christine F. Karger, Loretta and Allan Kaplan, an anonymous donor, Diane M. Tkach and James F. Freundt, Margot Levin Schiff and the Harold Schiff Foundation, Jane Woldenberg, Julie and Roger Baskes, the Hickey Family Foundation, the Jentes Family, and the Reed Family Foundation.

Additional support is contributed by an anonymous donor, the Jack and Peggy Crowe Fund, the Suzanne and Wesley M. Dixon Exhibition Fund, and The Regenstein Foundation Fund.

Members of the Luminary Trust provide annual leadership support for the museum’s operations, including exhibition development, conservation and collection care, and educational programming. The Luminary Trust includes an anonymous donor, Karen Gray-Krehbiel and John Krehbiel, Jr., Kenneth C. Griffin, the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris, Josef and Margot Lakonishok, Ann and Samuel M. Mencoff, Sylvia Neil and Dan Fischel, Cari and Michael J. Sacks, and the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation.

This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Topics

• Exhibitions
• Artists
• Impressionism