In February 1876, Pierre-Auguste Renoir invited Gustave Caillebotte to take part in the second Impressionist exhibition—a follow-up to the group’s scandalous debut, in 1874, which had no jury and no prize, and threw open its arms to radical painters rejected by the state-sponsored Salon, artists such as Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne. Caillebotte, a 27-year-old former soldier and a qualified lawyer, had only been studying at Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts for three years. But his breakout work, The Floor Scrapers—daring in its perspective, vivid colors, and salacious subject of half-naked male laborers—was progressive enough to be denied by the Salon in 1875. The Salon’s loss was Impressionism’s gain.
What set Caillebotte apart from other painters of the time were his large-scale, incredibly realist pictures of the inhabitants of modern bourgeois Paris, which he rendered in brazenly unique compositions.
