Gustave Caillebotte – In a Café

Gustave Caillebotte, Dans un café (1880), oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen (on loan from the Musée d'Orsay, Paris).

A slightly doughy-faced and rumpled man stands with hands in pockets, his collar loose at the neck and with his back to a large gilt-framed mirror. He is loitering in an upscale Parisian café. His bowler hat identifies him as standing socially a rung below the upper bourgeois classes that continued to sport the black silk top hat, the chapeau haut-de-forme, as hanging above the head-in-hand figure in front of him (to the rear of him as we look at the mirror’s reflection). His manner of wearing the bowler, set back on his head, and its fractionally too small a size, suggests him to be a member of the urban petit bourgeoisie, the class of small business owners, shopkeepers, clerks and low-level merchants who interfaced uncomfortably between those above and below them.

The small balding figure with his back to us seems to own a bowler too. There is something about the respective stances of each of the figures in this painting that suggest that an interview is being conducted in the background (some critics think they are playing cards which doesn’t seem right to me) rather than the sharing of un verre between equals while the central figure waits his turn, somewhat nonchalantly, even insolently or resentfully. The hats hanging above them are what semioticians call a ‘sign vehicle’, gesturing towards the wearers, the referents, sitting beneath. In fact, we see four hats in this painting, the two mentioned just now, the one on the main figure’s head and the reflection of the same in the mirror. These last two seem to be signifying their wearer’s place in the world, placed on a lateral line marginally below the others.

I think that what might seem like my trivial observations on hats speaks to questions of class and the visual identifiers of it are particularly relevant when thinking about Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894). He was one of the few Impressionist artists who enjoyed comfortable wealth. Born into a well-to-do family living on one of the posh streets of the recently ‘Haussmanised’ Paris, he inherited a large fortune on the death of his father, and was able to pursue his interest in art free from the same kind of financial worries that plagued Monet for instance for much of his life (Jackie Wullschläger’s recent book Monet: The Restless Vision is particularly revealing on the topic of Monet’s periods of pecuniary distress). In fact, not only did Caillebotte make art himself, but he supported many of his fellow artists, many of whom were struggling financially, by buying their paintings and organising exhibitions on their behalf and promoting them to collectors. He personally amassed a great collection of Impressionist art, more than 500 works, most of which were bequeathed to the French nation, and which now live in the Musée d’Orsay and form the core of its collection.

Gustave Caillebotte, Self Portrait (1892), oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

So, he would have been acutely aware of his privilege but also aware too of the stratification of Parisian society in La Belle Époque, a period, it should be remembered, that followed hard on the heels of the bloodshed and revolutionary violence of the Paris Commune, with its factional radical-socialist temper. The suppression that followed ushered in a period of deep political and social division and Caillebotte’s oeuvre is fascinating therefore for the ways in which he looks at classes, high and low, unflinchingly and unpatronisingly but with curiosity too. His work is surprisingly free from any de haut en bas sensibility that might have been expected and instead bears out T.J. Clark’s central argument in his seminal work The Painting of Modern Life, that class tension and uncertainty, the result of profound social and economic change manifest in the modern urban city, was reflected in both the Impressionist movement’s artistic style and content as a response to this zeitgeist. Their art interpreted uncertain and unstable times.

There is a certain tawdriness to the dispositions and relationships shown in In a Café, as if Caillebotte is showing us critically the demeaning humiliation that inheres the spectacle of inter-class dependencies in the new political and social order. However, scholars have identified the subject of the painting (or at least the sitter for it) as a family friend and notary, Albert Courtier. This is a little confusing as notaries were well-regarded, influential haute bourgeois men, well-respected for their legal training and expertise – pillars of the community as we might term it today, upholding its conservative values. And yet the well-upholstered figure depicted seems a little shabby and quite possibly drunk judging by his leaning back against the table behind him.

Caillebotte’s clever use of the mirror in the painting, a device also deployed two years later by Manet in A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, somewhat distances the central figure from this social milieu – a mirror reflection is accurate of course and yet it entails a separation. That metaphorical and physical distance is collapsed in reality, by bringing all three figures into the close proximity of the picture’s surface so that a sense both of immediacy and estrangement is unmistakable. For the viewer it evokes a mise en abyme alienation, as if the people shown are actors playing a part in a human drama the stage directions for which are difficult to follow. We, like the main figure, are witnesses to the ‘play’, albeit once or twice removed.

It’s a sunny day outside, as we can see from the bright daylight shining through the striped awning at top right, but far from feeling at ease under its benediction, the central figure is obliged to submit himself to whatever is going on inside. He, like his fellow citizens trying to make their way in the world, is subject to the demeaning materialism and pervasive monetary transactions - see the stacked pile of saucers for tabs payments and tips on the table - that urban living entails. He seems strangely rootless and disillusioned in this setting, sidelined (literally in this composition) by the gilded artifice in which he only seems uneasy. Is this modernity all it’s cracked up to be, the artist seems to be asking. With its plush banquettes in fancy cafés inducing a mood not of well-being and affluence but of dissatisfaction, awkwardness and envy. There may even be a suggestion, with the absinthe sat on the table and the main figure’s slightly sozzle-eyed demeanour, that dependency and addiction are the prices to be paid for ‘progress’.

In much of Caillebotte’s work, representations of different kinds of masculinity are in play. From the naked-to-the-waist labouring manhood of The Floor Scrapers (1875) to the seemingly chauvinistically spectating Man on a Balcony, Boulevard Haussmann (1880). In fact, the Musée d’Orsay held an exhibition on this very idea late last year called Caillebotte - Peindre les hommes. What distinguishes Dans un café for me, however, is the way in which any certainty around masculine identity that you might expect to abide in this men-only scene is profoundly compromised by the powerful sense of loneliness and disconnection that the sloping-shouldered central figure exudes. The painting depicts a man whose sense of belonging is, at this moment, in doubt and whose selfhood in terms of both class and male bravado, is tragically and pitifully undermined.