Caillebotte Cassatt Degas Manet Monet Morisot Pissarro Renoir

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These men are finishing a floor. They are scraping away the top layer of wood so each board is level with the one next to it and the entire floor is smooth and even. The man on the right is running a planing tool over each crack, which makes a striped pattern on the floor. The man in the middle is scraping away an even finer layer of wood, while the man on the left reaches for a file to sharpen his scraping tool.

Two kinds of curlycue
The curly wood shavings echo the shapes in the balcony railing outside the window. Artists often use similar shapes to visually connect different parts of a painting.

Three men or only one?
Do these men look alike to you? Caillebotte probably painted one man in three different positions. This adds to the unity of the painting since there are repeated images of the same long arms and slender body. Imagine how different the painting would look with three very different workers.

Beautiful bodies
Caillebotte wanted to celebrate the beauty of men at work in the modern world, but the public was shocked. They were used to seeing paintings of Greek gods and heroes, not simple laborers of their own time. One critic wrote, "The subject is doubtless vulgar." Another called it "ugly" and a third found it "strange and rather unpleasant."