Gustave Callebotte, The Floor Scrapers

            I love this painting. In society at this time, the upper class didn’t ever see the “peasants” in their everyday world. They were never exposed to the people that were beneath them. That worked for them. The people that sweat to live and lived to sweat. These people were stuck in the bottom. It was a shock to society when Callebotte painted these floor scrapers. They hated it. That is why we should love it. It is Real. Real live in a painting is what we should be looking for. This was paving the way for a different kind of art.

            So many things were going on during this time. A composer by the name of Joseph Philbrick Webster was popular during this time and one of his famous works was “Lorena.” This was a song that was important during the American Civil war because it was written about his broken engagement and make soldiers think about their loved ones back home while they were at war.

            This song doesn’t have much to do with the art except that I picked it because it shows that so much goes on in the world at a time. These small things are happening on the surface, like broken engagements, or larger things, like a civil war. But they all run together in life. The Floor Scrapers amazes me, because although all of this can be happening on the surface there is people behind the scense hurting too. Everyone endures something in life if its poverty, war, broken hearts. Life has a way of intertwining just about anything.