Die Klavierstunde

Caillebotte belonged to the Impressionist circle as much through his wallet as his brush. He had inherited a fortune and quietly bought his friends' unsellable canvases when no one else would. His own paintings kept returning to the well-off Paris he actually lived in. Here a girl practises at an upright piano while an older woman guides her, in the hushed, curtained comfort of a bourgeois drawing room, where music lessons were part of how daughters were raised. He painted it in 1881. The picture eventually passed to Michel Monet, the son of his old friend Claude, and came to the Marmottan in 1966 as part of that bequest.