Gustave Caillebotte, The Floor Scrapers, 1875

At the 1875 Salon, The Floor-Scrapers was rejected as too vulgar - a semi-nude painting of the urban lower class at work. Gustave Caillebotte was criticized for his choice of subject matter and his frank interpretation of the male figures. Critics claimed the shirtless men were too thin, their chests too narrow, and their proportions simply not idealized enough. Louis Enault proclaimed, “Do the nude, gentlemen, if the nude suits you…. But either make your nude beautiful or leave it alone.” Caillebotte, a wealthy lawyer and engineer with an inheritance from his parents (who sold blankets to the French army), could afford to ignore the whims of the Salon judges and take up the philosophy of Impressionism.

The unusual perspective of Caillebotte’s painting traps the workers, weighing down on them, but the men themselves appear unconcerned. Two of them have casually turned their heads to converse with each other, and a bottle of alchohol sits off to the side. The long, sinewy arms of the workers are better suited to labor than the impressive physique of classical statuary. They are scraping a layer of older varnish off the floor in order to clean and prepare it for a new coat, in long, regular strokes. The discarded shavings curl and twist in a manner that echoes the metalwork of the door in the upper-right corner. The tilted floor, with its horizon line almost at the top of the painting, is characteristic of Caillebotte’s style, an affectation borrowed from the newly developing art of photography.