But when it comes to the significance of the Caillebotte, there is absolutely no question. His best paintings are rare; many are still owned by his descendants.
“It sounds vulgar to say,’’ said Malcolm Rogers, MFA director, “but every great museum in the world would want this picture.’’
The Caillebotte painting is from a private foundation and has been on loan to the National Gallery in London since the later 1990s.
It depicts a man vigorously drying himself after getting out of a bath. The man is seen from behind, almost life-size. His clothes are folded on a chair; his empty boots and a wet towel are on the floor.
The scene is strikingly intimate, and the man’s off-balance pose is deliberately awkward. Strong light streams through a drawn white curtain. Almost every object in the picture is placed at an angle except for the man, whose back is directly parallel to the picture plane. There are wet footprints leading from the bath to his feet.
“This guy is no Arcadian bather,’’ says George Shackelford, chairman of the MFA’s Art of Europe department. “It’s perfectly mundane - and expressly so.’’
As a life-sized depiction of a full-length figure, says Shackelford, the painting “adds a dimension to what’s already one of the world’s greatest Impressionist collections.’’
With one or two exceptions, he explains, the MFA’s Impressionist holdings are “dominated by landscape and a taste for the pastoral.’’ The Caillebotte, by contrast, is an urban interior - as is the MFA’s last major Impressionist acquisition, Degas’s “Duchessa di Montejasi with her daughters Elena and Camilla,’’ which was bought in 2003 for more than $20 million.
Moreover, says Shackelford, full-body depictions of male nudes by Impressionists were “so rare as to be almost … well, there are only maybe half a dozen of them.’’
