Detail of Man at his Bath by Caillebotte in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, July 2011

Man at His Bath

Gustave Caillebotte (French, 1848–1894)

1884

Medium/Technique Oil on canvas

Dimensions 144.8 x 114.3 cm (57 x 45 in.)

Credit Line Museum purchase with funds by exchange from an Anonymous gift, Bequest of William A. Coolidge, Juliana Cheney Edwards Collection, and from the Charles H. Bayley Picture and Painting Fund, Mary S. and Edward J. Holmes Fund, Fanny P. Mason Fund in memory of Alice Thevin, Arthur Gordon Tompkins Fund, Gift of Mrs. Samuel Parkman Oliver—Eliza R. Oliver Fund, Sophie F. Friedman Fund, Robert M. Rosenberg Family Fund, and funds donated in honor of George T. M. Shackelford, Chair, Art of Europe, and Arthur K. Solomon Curator of Modern Art, 1996-2011

Accession Number: 2011.231

Collections: Europe

Classifications: Paintings

This painting presents an unusually intimate scene from everyday life at the grand scale once reserved for formal history subjects. The tin tub and discarded nightshirt at right, along with the clothing draped neatly upon the chair and the emphatically contemporary boots, make this man less nude in a classical sense than frankly naked. The muscular tension, disheveled hair, and wet footprints on the parquet indicate the physicality of an actual body at work—having just left the bath and now vigorously toweling off—rather than an idealized body undertaking an imagined heroic action. Positioned at close proximity to the viewer—this most private of moments made public—this man, back turned and head bowed, nevertheless remains decidedly separate.


Provenance: By descent from the artist to the Chardeau family, Paris; 1967, sold by the Chardeau family to Bernard Lorenceau (b. 1921 - d. 1996), Paris; 1967, sold by Lorenceau to a private collection, Switzerland; 2011, sold from this private collection to the MFA. (Accession Date: June 22, 2011)

Text from: collections.mfa.org/objects/537982/man-at-his-bath