Many leading artists in mid-19th century France liked to test their artistic skills by depicting farm workers and peasants at toil in the countryside – Courbet’s The Stone Breakers (1850) and Millet’s The Gleaners (1857), for example.
As the century wore on, some artists began to explore the concept of men and women at work in urban settings – Manet’s The Road-Menders in the Rue de Berne (1878) springs to mind, as does Women Ironing (1884) by Degas. Of this genre, a personal favourite of mine comes from Gustave Caillebotte and is called The Floor Scrapers (Les Raboteurs de Parquet).
It depicts three topless men working on hands and knees, scraping away at a parquet floor in a Parisian apartment (thought to be Caillebotte’s own studio). The composition is documentary-style, focusing on the actions and techniques of the floor-scrapers. Daylight enters the room from a window on the far wall and glosses the smooth floorboards with a white sheen. There are several floor-scraping tools as well as an opened bottle of (presumably cheap) wine. The diagonal alignment of the floorboards is offset by the rectangular panels on the far wall and by the curlicue motif of the iron grill on the window and the wood shavings that litter the floor. It is a masterpiece of realist painting.
His piece was perfectly in keeping with academic traditions, in terms of its perspective and the modelling and positioning of the nude torsos of the workers. However, despite this, the painting was rejected at the 1875 Salon because of its ‘vulgar’ realism. There’s no accounting for taste. So Caillebotte threw his lot in with the Impressionists and exhibited it at the Impressionist Exhibition of 1876.
These days, The Floor Scrapers is held in the Musée d’Orsay, although when I visited, a few years ago, I was disappointed to find it was not on display – you can’t win ‘em all (and I’ll just have to visit again when next in Paris)!
