In 1875, Caillebotte painted the urban proletariat with a touch of realism that the Paris Salon of 1875 could not accept. The subjects, though, were working-class, which, because of realism, became acceptable subjects in art; the spread was mainly among country workers and peasants. The normal urban middle class or ‘working’ class was rarely depicted. The Paris Salon called the work too vulgar and too nude for their societal class (very similar to Edgar Degas’s Washerwoman). But Degas and Auguste Renoir admired it and encouraged him to exhibit it at the Impressionist exhibitions. When it was exhibited, it made waves, with admirers calling it a true picture of reality in such an intimate scene, while critics called it crude, vulgar, and even anti-artistic. Zola said, “painting that is so accurate that it makes it bourgeois.” Caillebotte once again uses mastered architectural techniques that show his exemplary understanding of geometry and dimensions in art. The three workers are trapped in the heat, where humidity trapped under the floorboards during construction has caused them to buckle upwards at the edges. Their bodies are sleek with sweat. A bottle sits ideally with a class, whose? Caillebotte as he paints? Or the workers to take off some edge? The tools lie scattered because they are frequently used and switched between. The entire picture is that of raw realism and a tough life that is so common yet rarely depicted. However, after joining the Impressionists, Caillebotte slowly lost this touch and began to draw in an Impressionist style. Caillebotte was one of the rare artists who didn’t draw for some social, political, or huge, world-changing cause. But rather for the process of creating art itself. Perhaps because he was privileged enough to do that, but it can’t be denied that he held some innate talent for art, which made him such an admired artist of that time. Artists, at the end of the day, end up being artists not for fame or any other ulterior motive, but just because the process of creating art is so fulfilling that it satisfies their souls. And Caillebotte is the perfect proof of the same.
When looking at the balletic exertion of Gustave Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers, one suspects a profound act of imaginative trespass. Here was a wealthy, thirty-year-old scion of the Parisian bourgeoisie, an engineer by training, a collector and patron of the avant-garde by social station, who chose to paint not the leisurely absinthe drinkers or ballerinas of his fellow Impressionists, but the sinewy, bare-chested labourers refinishing the floor of his own family’s studio apartment. The result is a painting of rigorous, disquieting realism that serves as a radical manifesto for modern art.
