Gustave Caillebotte, painting masculine

Gustave Caillebotte was a painter, collector and patron of the arts who lived in the second half of the 19th century in France. He was a friend of many artists - including Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro - and played a fundamental role in organizing the Impressionist exhibitions held in Paris between 1877 and 1882. The exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay investigates Caillebotte as an artist around the theme of the male portrait which characterizes much of his pictorial production. In his desire to produce true and new art, Caillebotte takes as his subject Haussmann's Paris and the holiday resorts around the capital. Places populated by the men who surround him (his brothers, the workers who work for his family, his runner friends) and who describe the world in which the artist lives. Responding to the "realistic" program, he introduces new figures into painting such as the urban worker, the man on the balcony, the sportsman or even the naked man in the privacy of his toilet. His greatness as an artist has been a recent rediscovery and some of his works are today present in the most important museum collections in the world such as Les raboteurs de parquet (1875) or iconic paintings such as Jeune Homme à la fenêtre (1876). The exhibition arrives on the occasion of the 130th anniversary of the artist's death in 1894. A date that coincides with the bequest that Caillebotte made to the French State of his collection of impressionist art. A legacy that was not immediately accepted by the artistic "bureaucracies" of those times who did not look favorably on the art of the Impressionists.