Mann, der sich das Bein abtrocknet

In 1884 the male nude was almost a forbidden subject in French painting. A naked woman at her bath was everywhere in the Salon, but a naked man doing an ordinary private thing was not something buyers wanted on the wall. Caillebotte, who had money of his own and did not need to sell, painted it anyway. Here a man sits on a wooden chair and bends to dry his raised leg with a white towel, caught in the plain awkward pose of any real person getting out of a bath. Degas had been making pictures of women doing exactly this, and Caillebotte turned the idea onto a man. He left the surface rough and unfinished, and he kept the work, showing it to few people while he was alive.