Mann auf dem Balkon

Caillebotte painted this from his own apartment window, at the corner of the rue Gluck and the boulevard Haussmann in Paris. That boulevard was only a couple of decades old, one of the broad straight avenues cut through the medieval city during Baron Haussmann's vast rebuilding. The well-dressed man leans at the railing with his back to us, looking down at the traffic and trees below, so we end up watching the city over his shoulder. Caillebotte was wealthy enough that he never needed to sell his work, and he returned again and again to this kind of scene: men at windows and on balconies, gazing out at the newly modern streets they lived above.