Gustave Caillebotte; Raboteurs de parquet. 1875. Musee d’Orsay, Paris, France.

The Watermill bedrooms and public rooms are stuffed to the gunwales with original artworks, most of them paintings of the Watermill and of the unique splendour of the surrounding countryside of Lunigiana, unspoiled rural Tuscany at its best, But one or two ‘pictures of people’ do grace our walls: unique, intriguing, enigmatic, designed to stimulate conversation and debate. In a previous blog, we showed you David Jones’ ‘piece de resistance depicting Henri di Toulouse-Lautrec beavering away in his 1890 Montmartre studio,

Another late 19^th century French painter is celebrated in the Ghirlandaio bedroom, where we display Gustave Caillebotte’s masterpiece, Les Raboteurs de parquet, now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, France. It is usually known in English as ‘The floor scrapers.’Unlike the David Jones and most of our other artworks, we don’t have the original, more’s the pity, but the reproduction in the Ghirlandaio bedroom lets you appreciate the robust vigour of his work, one of the first paintings to depict the Parisian working class.

It reintroduces the male nude in painting,  but these men are no heroes of antiquity like Hercules or Odysseus. Despite their demeaning posture, however, their honest labour makes them modern heroes. The painting was rejected by the Academy, which criticised its ‘vulgar subject matter.’  Caillebotte showed it at the second exhibition of the Impressionists in 1876.

Why is Caillebotte less well known than many of his Impressionist contemporaries? He is as good as most, and better than many, but ask any art lover to come up with Impressionist names and Monet and Renoir  would trip off the tongue, and you could probably quickly add Degas, Sisley, Pissarro and, of course, in these days when when it’s (quite rightly) de rigueur to celebrate women artists, Berthe Morisot.

But Caillebotte? His name is difficult to pronounce (Kayibott is the best I can do) and it’s even easier to forget how to spell it. Had he been called Dubois or Blanc, I am sure he would be much better known. But at least we keep his memory alive in our Ghirlandaio bedroom. And you can read more about him online in the DailyArt magazine by clicking here.