Need More Brooding Men in Your Life? Louis Vuitton Has a Fix.

On the fifth floor of the Louis Vuitton store in midtown Manhattan, two moody men have taken up residence. Kind of.

Thanks to loans from the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Musée d’Orsay, the Espace Louis Vuitton New York is showcasing two works by the famous painter Gustave Caillebotte, known for his Impressionist works that capture the urban landscape of 19th-century Paris as well as male vulnerability. The paintings on display are “Jeune Homme à sa Fenêtre” (“Young Man at His Window”) and “Partie de Bateau” (“Boating Party”). The former features, as you might guess, a young man looking out the window of his Parisian apartment. While his face is hidden and the room behind him is dark, the street below is illuminated and lively. The latter highlights another solitary man, looking off into the distance, rowing a boat all alone. In both, the viewer is sharing close quarters with the subject. You can see these works for free yourself (just book an appointment) at the Louis Vuitton store on 57th street.

“Caillebotte introduced the spectator in his picture. You are in the boat. You are in the street or in the room,” Jean-Paul Claverie, adviser to the president at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, said of the artist’s visionary approach to his work. “That’s really modern.”

“They both, in quite different ways, show really sensational and fundamental features of what Caillebotte was all about: the image of this slightly brooding, solitary man,” Katherine Elizabeth Fleming, the president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, told me. “I used to live in Paris for many years, on a French second floor, and I used to spend a huge amount of time doing exactly what that guy is doing — standing at the window, looking out over the street.”

Visitors gawked at the works, telling other viewers how “great” it was to see the paintings in person, traversing between the two to understand the silent conversation that might be happening between these works, between the men portrayed in them. I stared at the paintings myself, looking at the tiny brushstrokes they were made of.

“Among the Impressionist painters, Caillebotte is probably the one who relates the most to today,” Paul Perrin, the chief curator and director of the conservation and collections at Musée d’Orsay, said, noting the painter’s depiction of men in intimate and vulnerable situations, sometimes alone and with visible emotion, as ahead of its time.

The paintings are open to the public by appointment through November 16.