A Balcony in Paris

Caillebotte painted this from his own front window on the Boulevard Haussmann, one of the wide, straight avenues that Baron Haussmann had cut through the old tangled streets of Paris only a couple of decades earlier. The city in these pictures is brand new, still smelling of money and fresh stone. Rather than lean out over the boulevard, Caillebotte paints it as he actually saw it, through the ornamental ironwork of his balcony rail, which slices across the whole foreground and holds the street at a distance. He had been studying Japanese prints, which framed their views in just this cropped, off-centre way. Comfortably wealthy himself, he spent these years painting the calm, well-off Paris he lived inside.