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Gustave Caillebotte (1848-94) was a wealthy, generous, admirable, talented artist, who helped support the impoverished Monet and Renoir, organised the Impressionist exhibitions and bought

many paintings by his colleagues.  A contributor writes, “He rented the space, met individually with artists to plan their submissions, and lent works from his growing collection to ensure a

balanced and cohesive installation.”  As he told Monet,  “I will take care of it.  I will take care of everything.”  A good athlete, he also engaged in competitive rowing and sailing.  Guy

de Maupassant wrote, “a woman is indispensable on a boat because she keeps your mind and heart alert, because she animates, amuses and diverts everyone.”  (T.S. Eliot’s _The Waste Land_, by

contrast, satirises the woman who has precarious sex “supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.”) Curators are always eager to enliven their pictures with sex, but there’s absolutely no

evidence for their speculation that the man leaning over the bridge in Caillebotte’s _The Pont de l’Europe_ (1876) is a male prostitute.  He’s gazing down at the trains in the Gare

Saint-Lazare and is not on the qui vive for potential customers on the bridge. Le Pont de l’Europe (1876). Musée du Petit Palais, Genève An even more outrageous example occurs in the

Introduction to _Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men _(the catalogue for an exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Getty Museum, Los Angeles and Art Institute, Chicago, October 2024 to

October 2025).  The three editors, with cavalier use of “may have”, “must have” and “seems to have”, quote an unpublished dissertation of 2000 that claims, without any evidence, that the

artist had “growing difficulty in managing the disorder and anxiety he felt before his models’ bodies.”  They emphasize his “shocking sensuality” and “repressed homosexuality”, assert that

he was “preoccupied with notions of masculinity and virility” and that he “subverted the codes of masculinity” with “a form of conscious and unconscious desire”. After the previous

exhibitions of Caillebotte’s work they are desperate to say something sensational and different, even if it’s false and unconvincing, and confess “this kind of unselfconscious psychic

leakage is pure gold to the academic”.  With no new facts or biographical proof, the critics want to “lift the veil,” expose and co-opt Caillebotte into their sodality, and rebaptise him as

a homosexual. In _Paris Street, Rainy Day _(1877), his huge masterpiece in the Art Institute, Chicago, a tall thin green lamppost divides the picture and a massive triangular residential

building juts into the busy square.  A horse-drawn carriage passes a pharmacy and another carriage drifts out of the picture on the left.  An elegantly dressed couple dominate the foreground

and look to the left at an unseen person or incident.  The man has a drooping moustache and wears a top hat and open overcoat; the woman, dressed in a high fur hat, brown fur-trimmed coat

and skirt, holds his arm and is protected by his umbrella.  Their umbrella just touches another one held by a man passing close to them in the opposite direction.  It’s not raining hard, and

all the numerous pedestrians behind them stroll through the misty atmosphere at a leisurely pace.  The dots on her veil, her bright pearl earring and long row of buttons on her coat

brilliantly echo the raindrops.  His open umbrella resembles the wings of a bat and the pointed fold in the center suggests a sharp bat’s head.  The shiny wet cobblestones will later appear

in _The Third Man_ and many other noir films. Gustave Caillebotte – Paris Street; Rainy Day Caillebotte’s _Self-Portrait _(1892), an indoor scene (like the paintings I describe below), is

reproduced but not discussed in the book.  Before a cloudy grey-blue background, the artist stands sideways and turns his head toward the viewer.  He wears a dark blue jacket and nearly

fills the frame.  He has closely cropped grey hair, brown moustache and shaggy brown goatee.  His narrow, half-shadowed face, lined forehead and cheeks make him look older than 44.  His

rather sad and sombre expression, personal yet reserved, stares out at the viewers but doesn’t challenge them. Gustave Caillebotte. Portrait de l’artiste (Self-portrait). c. 1892. Musée

d’Orsay, Paris The stately room in _Luncheon_ (1876) has a red and green carpet, four tall curtained and heavily draped windows, three mustard-colored padded chairs, a clock on the wall

above the _meuble_ that frames the mother, and a sideboard displaying blue and white plates.  The heavily laden dark circular table is cluttered with fruit bowls, a glittering array of

silver dishes and platters, cut-glass wine decanters and half-filled glasses.  The rude and greedy adult son bends down, tucks in, slices and eats most of the food on his plate.  He has no

time for small talk with his mother, who’s dressed in widow’s black and is still being served by the old butler (a wrinkled retainer).  Intimate yet distant, the diners are self-absorbed and

silent.  The  place-setting in the foreground for the artist—or perhaps for the viewer—is visible, but no one appears.  By comparison, Monet’s _Luncheon_ (1873) portrays two women, a baby

and a servant in a more intimate and congenial family atmosphere. Luncheon, 1876 – Gustave Caillebotte In _The Bezique Game_ (1881), three seated pipe-smoking card players and two observers

form a tight circle around the baize-covered card table.  One man with closed eyes, who dozes on the couch behind them, contrasts with the other five men’s intense interest in the unusually

complex game.  This painting, with its sharp focus, dark colours and middle-class bachelors playing cards, is more ambitious and interesting than Cézanne’s more famous _The Card Players

_(1892). The Bezique Game, 1881, Gustave Caillebotte In _Floor Scrapers _(1875), an image of the artist’s studio under construction, bare-chested, long-armed men on their knees and working

in unison, momentarily pause from their arduous work to look at each other and exchange a few words. The wine bottle on the right also provides some relief.  The violent realism and frantic

planing have produced, with the help of the straight hammer to pound in the nails, the mass of curled wood shavings on the floor.  The knife at the bottom is used to sharpen the blade of the

two-handled plane.  A double window on the balcony lets in the light.  The circular ironwork on the outdoor grill echoes the curled shavings, and contrasts with the horizontal panels on the

rear wall and the vertical parallel lines carved on the surface.  The men on the sharply tilted, sea-deck floor look ready to slide toward the viewer like the figures in Van Gogh’s _Night

Café_ (1888). Gustave Caillebotte – The Floor Planers The tough male figure of the French infantryman in _Soldier_ (1881), painted in thick impasto, appears in profile and looks to the left.

  He wears a bright red dented _kepi_ and has black hair, strong nose, drooping moustache, firm chin and bull neck.  His handsome loose-fitting uniform has a gold collar, two rows of

fourteen gold buttons (one hidden by a fold in his long blue tunic) and more subdued red trousers whose turn-ups touch the tip of his shiny black boots.  He holds a smoking cigarette in his

curved right hand and plunges his hidden left hand into his pocket.  He stands at ease with open legs, but looks ready to fight again after France’s disastrous defeat in the Franco-Prussian

War of 1870-71. A Soldier, Gustave Caillebotte, 1881 The thin pale body of Caillebotte’s _Nude on a Couch_ (1880) is very different from his _Nude Woman Reclining on a Divan _(1873).  The

early painting (not reproduced in this book) portrays an extremely desirable swooning woman with folded legs, closed eyes and clear features.  She faces the viewer and lies on her side above

a swirling, striped orgasmic cloth that falls to the floor.  Her arms are right-angled above her head and embrace the satin cushion like a lover. The arms raise her full spread breasts and

pink nipples, and draw the eye to her dark, matte, sharp-edged triangle of pubic hair—the target at the centre of the picture. Nude on a Couch, Gustave Caillebotte, 1880 In the later

painting the woman is stretched out on a deeply-cushioned, elaborately floral-patterned couch.  Her discarded dress and underwear, leaving their mark on her waist, are spread out above her

head, and her boots are placed on the wooden floor.  Her left arm is raised and bent at a right angle above her head, and her right leg is also raised at the same sharp angle.  Her right

hand rests on her narrow chest and caresses her partly exposed nipple.  Her face is mostly shadowed, her features indistinct.  Her underarm hair leads the eye down her body to her slightly

raised Lucas Cranach-style belly and to a luxuriant growth of electrified pubic hair.  Lying flat on her back like a patient etherised upon a table, she looks weak and vulnerable rather than

sensual and attractive. _Man at His Bath_ (1884) portrays a bushy-haired, naked muscular young man, facing away from the viewer and rubbing his back with a white towel.  He has the same

pose, legs spread and seen from the back, as the clothed _Young Man at the Window _(1876) looking down at the street below.  His buttocks bulge and his dark scrotum (another wrinkled

retainer) is barely visible.  His white towel, grey-zinc bathtub and discarded shirt on the floor form a triangle that surrounds the triangle of his legs and buttocks.  The austere room has

a wooden chair, white curtain and grey walls.  His trousers are on the wooden chair, his heavy boots on the floor.  There’s no auto-erotic element or sense that the artist is attracted to

this apparently working-class man. Man at His Bath, Gustave Caillebotte, 1884 Caillebotte lived with a younger working-class woman, Charlotte Berthier, for fifteen years, and the critics

admit there’s “no written evidence that the artist ever doubted his own masculinity and sexuality”.   Nevertheless, they emphatically declare that “women do not seem to be at the heart of

Caillebotte’s life”. Two critics coauthor this torture-to-read sentence, “Since homoerotic desire was an inversion, which is to say a natural, psychic transposition of normative

subject-object relations (a transposition of gender mimicked by the very setup of Caillebotte’s _Man at His Bath_), the male invert was a psychic woman who desired men as erotic objects.” 

(Academics have gender, not sex.)  As Byron said of Coleridge, “I wish you would explain your explanation.”  After this agonising argument, they must promise never, ever to write anything

again. These critics don’t even mention eight paintings that would explode their argument.  No one has claimed that Degas’ _Male Nude_ (1856) or Renoir’s _Young Boy with a Cat _1868), a

standing male seen from behind but turning his head engagingly toward the viewer, make these artists homosexual.  The clearly heterosexual Egon Schiele and Lucian Freud created much more

daring full-frontal nude self-portraits.  Caillebotte’s _Man at His Bath _is very different from Caravaggio’s _Cupid as Victor_ (1602), which portrays an adolescent boy with a fetching smile

and legs spread to show his genitals; and from the overtly homosexual nudes in Duncan Grant’s _Bathing_ (1911), and in Henry Tuke’s  _Lovers of the Sun_ (1923) and _Sunbathers_ (1927).  

Caillebotte’s bathers, by contrast, wear striped swimming costumes.  The homosexual emphasis in the Introduction and last chapter on _Man at His Bath _reveal that this book is based on the

weak foundation of a single misinterpreted picture, from Caillebotte’s total creation of 560 works. This misunderstanding distracts from the artist’s truly great achievements. Jeffrey Meyers

has published Homosexuality and Literature (1977) and Impressionist Quartet (2005).  His books have been translated into 14 languages. A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication

that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard

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