The Role of Masculinity in Caillebotte’s Rainy Day
Kelsey Carroll - November 12, 2022
Gustave Caillebotte, Rainy Day, 1877, Oil on Canvas, Art Institute of Chicago
Underneath Georges-Eugene Haussmann’s overhaul of Paris’s infrastructure under Napoleon III lay an overhaul of Paris’s cultural environment and social dynamics. With the restructuring of narrow, dirt streets into wide, cobblestoned boulevards came the introduction of cross-class leisure and entertainment activities wherein both objects and people were commodified. In an age of expanding viewing culture where bodies themselves were sites of spectacle, the roles, appearances, and standards of women and men became increasingly standardized and expected to be upheld. Whether a bachelor, viewing the city with a skeptical eye, or a husband and father, constantly on view, Haussmannized Paris established the city environment as a place in which one must play their part. In an image displaying a Haussmannized Parisian boulevard, Caillebotte’s compositional arrangement, perspective and brushwork serve to underscore the dual nature of masculinity in post-Haussmannization Paris, wherein masculinity or the “lack thereof” had become a defining and dividing factor among men.
Gustave Caillebotte was an upper-class bachelor impressionist painter, often finding himself lambasted for the supposed class dynamics on view in his works featuring middle-and lower-class men and women laboring in their jobs. His works often display unidealized bodies, emphasizing the male role in different class positions and exposing his own experience of masculinity. In late nineteenth century Paris, the “bachelor” was said to “not fulfill their responsibilities to the institution of family” by not having children and supporting a family, something increasingly more important to the bourgeois male to attend to now that heredity and lineage could no longer secure one’s legacy post-ancien régime, according to art historian Tamar Garb.1 Rules surrounding marriage and family life became more stringent in the nineteenth century, often equating the “bachelor” with the “homosexual,” while married men became guarantors of state achievement and national “power and progress.” 2 Caillebotte himself was formed “in the context of bourgeois constructions of masculinity,” leaving him with the tasks of chronicling the male experience and confronting the male identity head-on as a so-called “breaker” of these societal expectations. 3
We see this divide of men’s roles played out in the strict divide of the picture plane. Splitting the canvas vertically down the middle by a lamppost immediately allows the viewer to recall the industrialization and modernization of Paris due to Haussmann, with gas becoming the new way to light the town. Even more so, the lamppost serves to expose the viewer to varying degrees of masculine expectations within the Parisian cityscape. On the left-hand side, we see the city filled with what appear to be mostly men, whether it be a single man approaching the lamppost, the two men walking together on the far left, or the lone man scurrying umbrella-less toward the pharmacy in the background. Although it is impossible to know for sure the identity of such individuals, whose faces are modeled with few brushstrokes or turned away from the viewer, we can contrast the character of these individuals to what with which they are compositionally contrasted on the right hand side. On the right side of the canvas, we get an up close view of a couple, arm-in-arm with one another as the husband-figure makes sure the umbrella covers both himself and the woman to his left. If we are under the assumption that Rainy Day provides a depiction of a standard, Paris day out, it is not unreasonable to assume the painting includes representations of bachelors and heterosexual couples alike. On the boulevard, Caillebotte has separated the figures on the picture plane into the two defining roles of men to outrightly show this division of such figures in Parisian society.
If we picture Caillebotte taking the place of the viewer as a flaneur, ambling among the crowd and even seeming to almost run into figures head-on, we immediately see the degree of masculine representation exacerbated by Caillebotte’s personal background and the vantage point at which we, or Caillebotte himself, have been placed. The viewer is located in such a way where the heterosexual couple is the first thing that draws the eye, as they are walking toward the viewer and take up nearly the entire righthand side of the picture plane. They take precedence both in the painting and in Parisian day-to-day life, overshadowing the smaller, solo figures filling the rest of the frame. As a childless bachelor, Garb states Caillebotte’s masculinity “had not been turned to the common good and remained always, therefore, in question,” and in Rainy Day we see him placing the traditional standard of masculinity, the “family man,” above representation of his own self.4
Although Caillebotte is often grouped with the Impressionists, he breaks from the “traditional” impressionist subject of landscape by using such a loose style to instead depict a cityscape. Caillebotte’s impressionistic style mimics the fleeting eye of a flaneur from whose perspective we witness the scene. In the way the artist has captured a snapshot of city life with quick brushwork only refined around the subjects’ faces, featuring atmospheric perspective in the way the distance becomes clouded and non distinctive, we see the city through the eyes of a masculine, sweeping gaze, as an idler taking in each person in one fell swoop. French critic Stéphane Mallarmé argued that the Impressionists used light to depict truth itself by adopting air as a medium, and doing away with naturalist optical modes. A painting’s details should no longer be fixed on the canvas, but rather ever-changing just as light and shadow come in passing.5 In a similar way, we see the overarching “truth” of painting found in Impressionism being used to depict the overarching truth of masculinity that has pervaded Parisian society. Masculinity began to stand in for “modernity,” with femininity acting as its resistor and countering force, and impressionism thus became a way to display one’s individual experience of modernity.
We see the duality of masculinity apparent in Caillebotte’s choice of style in that just by employing an impressionistic style, the artist has implied the correlation between the scene he has painted and the “essence of now.” French poet Charles Baudelaire argued that the modern era needed to issue a new type of painting to capture the “fugitive, fleeting beauty of present day life,” while still retaining the eternal in present-day’s ephemerality. 6 Impressionism acted as the solution to this challenge by using the very day-to-day atmospheric substances of light and movement to capture a scene, and Caillebotte has included both sides of the masculine spectrum within his depiction of a fleeting, everyday moment. By doing this, Caillebotte makes clear that masculinity itself is the “eternal” in the “transitory” movement of people throughout the boulevard. 7
In the subject matter itself, Caillebotte once again shows how one’s sense of masculinity could be pitted against others’, albeit this time through one’s dress rather than one’s marital status. Mallarme notes that in the nineteenth century, men were required to sport the “obligatory dark male costume, relieved only by the white shirt, elaborate neck-tie and pale gloves” standing for austerity and merit while simultaneously renouncing aristocratic excess and luxury.8 While this was an attempt to create uniformity across classes, it did anything but, because men could easily tell the difference between high quality coats and gloves, despite their outward appearance remaining identical from a distance. In Rainy Day, we see Caillebotte clearly rendering the bowtie, white shirt, and black coat of the figure facing the viewer, as well as showing similar black, blue, and brown coats adorning each of the figures filling the middle-and-background. Additionally, each figure is clad with a top hat, adding to the sense of uniformity of figures in the crowd, despite the fact that we know each is judging the other for subtle differences in their attire. Although not pertaining to the duality of masculinity playing out in one’s marital status, Caillebotte’s detailed inclusion of such uniform dress indicates his awareness of dress as a secondary dividing factor among men.
As compared to the study of femininity and the role of the female artist in the nineteenth century, masculinity is viewed as undertheorized and solely as the power that femininity is resisting. However, the societal rules and restraints placed on men were just as disciplinary, as they were expected to lead a modern “nuclear family” and build wealth through generations. While the husband was equated with a leader, bachelors were equated with prostitutes due to their lack of participation in family building and were often looked down upon. In combination with the artist’s own background, Caillebotte’s Rainy Day serves as a pictorial representation of the masculine exceptions men faced in the new modern era, as well as representing those who refused to uphold such expectations.
1 Tamar Garb, “Gustave Caillebotte’s Male Figures: Masculinity, Muscularity, and Modernity,” in Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siècle France (London: Thames & Hudson, 1998): 34.
2 Garb, 33.
3 Garb, 30.
4 Garb, 41
5 Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Impressionists and Edouard Manet,” in The New Painting: Impressionism 1874-1886, ed. Charles S. Moffett (San Francisco, CA: Fine Arts Museum San Francisco, 1986): 31.
6 Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life [1863],” in The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, eds. Vanessa Schwartz and Jeannene Przyblyski (London: Routledge, 2004): 42.
7 Baudelaire, 40.
8 Garb, 35.
Works Cited
Baudelaire, Charles. “The Painter of Modern Life [1863].” In The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, 37-42. Edited by Vanessa Schwartz and Jeannene Przyblyski. London: Routledge, 2004.
Garb, Tamar. “Gustave Caillebotte’s Male Figures: Masculinity, Muscularity, and Modernity.” In Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siècle France, 24-53. London: Thames & Hudson, 1998.
Mallarmé, Stéphane. “The Impressionists and Edouard Manet.” In The New Painting: Impressionism 1874-1886, 27-36. Edited by Charles S. Moffett. San Francisco, CA: Fine Arts Museum San Francisco, 1986.
