Men in the off hours

Some years ago, I saw a painting that knocked my sense of the sexes sideways. It was an 1884 work by an Impressionist named Gustave Caillebotte of a nude figure emerging from the bath — the same trope that Degas or Bonnard so often employ because it allows you to observe a woman’s naked body in motion, absorbed in a private ritual replete with sensual pleasure.

Except that the nude that Caillebotte is presenting for our delectation is male, and this gender-switch totally upends our preconceptions about masculine power and prerogatives, about who gets to look at whom doing what.

Homme au Bain’s model is young, sturdy, athletic-looking. He has his back to us. He has just stepped out of the tub and is towelling himself dry; his large muscular buttocks are ruddy, seem chafed either from the steamy water or the towelling. The painter draws our eye to the shadowy violet-blue crease just north of the young man’s bottom, and between his legs we spy the dark hanging globe of his scrotum. The model’s fuzzy head is bent down, his gaze apparently fixed on the wet floor.

What’s unsettling is the disjunction between the jauntiness of the young bather’s stance — the center-stage display of his bare bottom, the wide planted legs, the vigorously brandished bath towel — and the almost hang-dog modesty of his bowed head: a downward stare that seems to express some kind of shame or inhibition.