Die Parkettschleifer

Three bare-backed workers on their knees scrape a wooden floor while light pours through a window. The Salon jury found it vulgar. Today The Floor Scrapers is one of the best-loved paintings in the Musée d'Orsay.

The story behind the painting

Gustave Caillebotte painted Les raboteurs de parquet, The Floor Scrapers, in 1875. Despite all the effort he put into it, the Salon of 1875 rejected it: the jury was shocked by working-class men shown in their trade, not fully clothed, and called it a vulgar subject. Caillebotte was hurt. Instead he showed it at the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876, together with a second, different version of the subject from 1876 and his Young Man at His Window. The apartment is now believed to be his own studio at 77 rue de Miromesnil, in the 8th arrondissement of Paris.

What to look for

We look down from above on three workers on hands and knees, scraping the floor of a bourgeois room. A window on the back wall lets in natural light that glides across the planks. All three have bare torsos and tilted heads, as if they were talking. Look for curls everywhere: the wood shavings on the floor, the ironwork of the window grille, the arched backs and arms. The three men do different parts of the same task in similar poses, a repetition Wikipedia compares to Degas. The canvas measures 102 by 146.5 cm.

Meaning and intent

Caillebotte combined the careful drawing and exact tones taught by the Académie with the bold perspective, natural light and modern subjects of the Impressionists. This is one of the first paintings of the urban working class, and it brings back the male nude in an updated form: instead of ancient heroes, the heroes of modern life, sinewy and strong. Their stooped poses could look demeaning, yet they convey strength and honest labour. Wikipedia also links the interest in the male nude to Caillebotte's presumed homosexuality, within a wider trend begun by Courbet's wrestlers.

Legacy

Critics were divided. Émile Zola praised the execution but called it anti-artistic, painting as neat as glass. Louis Énault found the workers' arms too thin. Others defended it: Émile Blémont called the Salon's refusal a very bad mark for the jurors, Marius Chaumelin saw a realist as raw as Courbet but wittier, and Philippe Burty compared it to the early Florentines. Caillebotte's family gave the painting in 1894 to the Musée du Luxembourg. It moved to the Louvre in 1929, the Jeu de Paume in 1947 and the Musée d'Orsay in 1986. In 1988 Angelin Preljocaj created a dance work inspired by it.