The Floor Scrapers

Caillebotte had trained as an engineer and studied at the official art school, and both show. The floorboards run in strict perspective from a high viewpoint, so that the floor rises up the canvas like a wall and the men seem to be pinned to it. Every stroke of the plane, every strip of raised wood, is drawn with precision. And yet the light is pure Impressionism, a cool glow that turns the bare backs to gold and silver and lies in long reflections on the polished boards. Look at the three heads, all bent, and at the arms, which repeat across the picture like a diagram of effort.

The Salon jury rejected the painting in 1875, reportedly finding its subject vulgar. Caillebotte showed it instead at the second Impressionist exhibition of 1876, where Zola and other critics praised its honesty. He became one of the group's most important supporters, buying works by Monet, Renoir and Pissarro with the family fortune, and his bequest of that collection to the state in 1894 is the foundation of the Orsay's Impressionist rooms. This painting came to the nation with it. It is the only picture of its era to treat manual work in a bourgeois interior as a subject worthy of a history painting.

Did You Know? Caillebotte's bequest to the French state was initially refused in part, and it took two years of argument before the Impressionist paintings he left were accepted.