Chance Encounters: How a Painting Changed My Life
- Alexander Lang
- 4 days ago
- 9 min read
Updated: 20 hours ago
From June through October, the Art Institute of Chicago held an exhibition cataloguing the life and career of the impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894).
A joint effort between the Art Institute, the Musee d’Orsay in Paris and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the exhibit Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World gathered into a single space all of Caillebotte’s most famous works.
For many who experienced this exhibit, it was an opportunity to immerse themselves in the masterpieces of one of the greatest painters of the 19th century. For me, this exhibit possessed much greater meaning:
Caillebotte is the reason why I married my wife.
The Floor Scrapers
I met my wife, Courtney, in college at a mutual friend’s birthday party on December 1, 2001. By chance, we ended up sitting near each other at the restaurant. Thanks to our close proximity, we had the opportunity to converse and, within seconds, I was enamored.
Courtney was extraordinarily intelligent, strikingly beautiful and, most importantly, we had palpable chemistry. I had dated many women, but this was the first time I felt a soul connection with someone.
Eventually, I mustered the courage to ask her out. For our first date, I invited Courtney to my dorm room to watch a movie. Upon entering, she immediately noticed a print of a painting above my computer. It was hard to miss as my walls were otherwise barren.
The print was of a painting by Gustave Caillebotte hung at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris called The Floor Scrapers.
Courtney was awestruck. Of all the possible art I could have on my wall, I had this particular Caillebotte. While Courtney was studying abroad in Italy, she had taken a trip to Paris where she visited the Musee d’Orsay. She encountered this painting and sat for nearly an hour studying it.
If you’ve never seen The Floor Scrapers or been exposed to Caillebotte’s work, he was part of the French Impressionist Movement. His subjects, like many of the impressionists, were average people traversing their ordinary lives.
The Floor Scrapers depicts three men refinishing a floor in his apartment. Caillebotte managed to capture this seemingly unremarkable moment in the most transcendent fashion. His use of shadows and light, and the position of the men’s bodies mid-movement causes the scene to feel alive.
When I was studying at Oxford University, a friend of mine who travelled to Paris saw The Floor Scrapers at the d’Orsay and was transfixed by it in the same way as Courtney. She bought the print for me as a gift.
I hung it above my computer as the only artwork on my wall at Oxford and, similar to Courtney, I had spent copious time examining the intricacies of this piece. It felt to me a reflection of my own struggles; a reminder of how our daily toil as human beings, although seemingly unremarkable, possesses incredible beauty.
Courtney felt like this was a sign from the universe. What are the chances that of all the artwork I could have on my wall, the one piece would be of her favorite painting?
As we got to know each other, there were other strange parallels we had in common. Her father’s family were Hungarian Jews who had immigrated to the United States in the early 20th century. My father’s family were Hungarian Jews who had immigrated around the same time.
Both of our nuclear families had relinquished their Jewish heritage in favor of Christianity. Our Jewish fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers had the exact same names.
What are the odds that, out of all the people I could have dated at Rice University, I would meet the one person who has a parallel background to my own?
It felt as though our relationship was meant to be and Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers symbolized our preordained bond and connection.
My Guilty Admission
On December 14, 2025, it will have been 24 years since our first date. What I don’t often admit about our first date is that I had no idea what the name of the painting was or the artist who painted it. Once Courtney entered my dorm room, our initial conversation went something like this:
Courtney: "Do you like Gustave Caillebotte?"
Alex: "Who?"
Courtney: She gestured towards the print, “Gustave Caillebotte. He painted this painting.”
Alex: "Oh, I studied at Oxford last year and my friend Jean brought that back from Paris for me."
Courtney: “It's called The Floor Scrapers and I love it!”
As you can tell, prior to meeting Courtney, I knew virtually nothing about art. In fact, I would say that prior to meeting Courtney, I knew virtually nothing about beauty.
I would have described The Floor Scrapers as a striking scene painted with an incredibly deft hand. However, I would have never utilized the adjective beautiful.
Likewise, if you had plopped me in front of a Renaissance painting like Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Botticelli’s Primavera, I might have called them intriguing, mysterious or lifelike, but beautiful? Such a characterization was reserved for flesh and blood humans.
Courtney had studied art history, imbuing her with a vast repository of knowledge about every famous piece of art on the planet. One night, she was schooling me on Michelangelo’s sculpture of David, which I had visited during a high school trip to Italy.
When I told her I had seen the David with my own eyes, she said, “Isn’t it the most amazing sculpture? To think he created that out of a piece of lifeless stone. Somehow Michelangelo managed to capture this kinetic energy where you feel like David could start moving at any moment. Hands down the most beautiful sculpture ever created.”
I know such a sentiment might seem obvious, but I had never thought of Michelangelo’s David as beautiful. Perhaps I wasn’t paying attention, or I was too wounded by human standards of beauty determining my social location, but her comment opened a door in my mind that had heretofore been closed.
After this discussion, every time we had a conversation about art, I would ask Courtney to describe what she found beautiful about a certain piece. Much of what she highlighted was small details that I overlooked. Slowly, over years, her instruction redefined my sense of beauty.
The Spirituality of Beauty
Ask yourself a question: When was last time you were awestruck by beauty?
I love posing this question because it reveals a lot about how a person perceives the world. What I have discovered is that most people’s definition of beauty is exceedingly narrow.
If you had asked me that question before meeting Courtney, I would have immediately thought of a beautiful woman. At the time, my application of the word beauty was primarily associated with members of the opposite sex. I had never considered applying the concept of beauty beyond movie stars and models.
After meeting Courtney, my sense of beauty swelled to include all manner of objects both manmade and natural. I became enamoured with the beauty of film, music, paintings and sculptures. Architecture, which previously held no interest for me, became a subject of endless fascination. Even high fashion, which always felt elusive, esoteric and elitist, piqued my curiosity.
I became obsessed with Hubble Space Telescope photography of the universe. When I spent time outside, the beauty of plants felt inescapable. I found the leaves of trees particularly marvelous as they reflected nature’s engineering perfection.
I fell in love with the movements of birds, the colorful patterns of their feathers and their incredible intelligence. The pooled water after a rainstorm was no longer a puddle to be avoided, but rather a mirror that reflects unusual portraits of the sun and clouds in the sky.
What I eventually realized is that my evolving sense of beauty was simultaneously enhancing my spiritual connection with God. The more I encountered and recognized beauty in the world, the more I felt in touch with the life force at the center of the universe.
Beauty is discussed in many religious traditions, most notably Islam. The Prophet Muhammed is famous for saying, "Allah is beautiful and He loves beauty".
The notion that beauty is a spiritual conduit to the divine might sound strange, but consider how beauty resonates with a person deep inside their being. Beauty connects us with the world and stirs something profound within our souls where we cannot fully articulate the cause.
This is why I wrote Restorative Beauty. I wanted to convey how a transformed sense of beauty has the potential to be spiritually metamorphic, mending our wounds and connecting us to oneness that binds all things together.
Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World
What I find remarkable is how our life's journey is often determined by chance encounters. I shudder to think how my life might have turned out if I had not sat next to Courtney at that birthday party.
Without that initial conversation, she would never have come to my dorm room to see The Floor Scrapers hanging on my wall and 23 years of marriage would have evaporated in an instant.
Thankfully, that chance encounter led down a path of beauty and discovery, which is why attending the Caillebotte exhibit felt like a full circle moment. Traversing the exhibit, all those years as Courtney’s pupil percolated to full expression.
For context, this is the first time we had ever seen so many of Caillebotte’s pieces side-by-side. The benefit of this type of art exhibition is pattern recognition. Details you might overlook in one painting become glaringly obvious when contrasted with other works.
What I immediately recognized is how Caillebotte had an incredible eye for painting people in motion. In almost every painting, even when the main figures are still, he manages to capture elements of motion, whether in background characters or in environmental details.
It occurred to me that Caillebotte includes this movement to capture the ephemeral nature of life. We want life to remain still, but existence always slips through our fingers. These features of movement slowly appear in his works following the untimely death of Caillebotte's brother, which had an exceptionally deleterious impact on his psyche.
We searched the placcards, but my insight was not highlighted by the exhibit itself. This revelation was the result of Courtney’s tutelage. She imbued me with tools to find beauty in the details of Caillebotte’s work that otherwise would have gone unnoticed.
After attending the exhibition, we sent an email to Dr. Gloria Groom, the curator from the Art Institute responsible for the exhibit. We told her of our connection to The Floor Scrapers and some of our insights from the exhibit. Dr. Groom affirmed that my theory was accurate! I will admit receiving affirmation from one of the most distinguished art historians in the United States felt like quite an achievement.
We had truly come full circle.
Conclusion
Courtney, Caillebotte and enigmatic beauty have all played an outsized role in my life because I sat in a specific chair at a birthday party I didn’t want to attend 24 years ago. Two chairs to the right or the left and my life would likely have moved in a completely different direction.
With that in mind, I want to end with a meditation/poem I wrote about chance encounters and what it was like meeting Courtney all those years ago. Below is a spoken version of those words set to the beautiful composition of Max Richter.
May your chance encounters offer you a glimpse of the enigmatic beauty that enshrouds the universe, transforming your life for the better.
Chance Encounters
Have you ever considered how our lives are shaped by chance encounters?
How you find yourself in a place you wouldn't normally be, and you come across someone who catches your eye?
They remind you of something within yourself, something long forgotten, a part of you that lies dormant but begs to be set free.
At first, you're trepidatious, but the mystery beckons you.
They radiate this numinous beauty, and though you can't quite put your finger on it, you long to be near them.
So you gather your courage and whisper, “Who are you? Why do I seem to know you?”
And as one word turns into two, there's this innate comfort that sets in, almost as if you've found your way home.
It's odd how you can't quite understand why this stranger, this person who you've never met before, beholds your essence in a way that has always felt elusive.
Is it love? No, something much deeper.
Souls bound together stretching back generations, intertwined by lifetimes of chance encounters.
Each time I repeat the same phrase as I hold you close, “I am so glad to have found you again.”