Boulevard Haussmann in the Snow

Caillebotte shared an apartment with his brother Martial at 31 boulevard Haussmann and painted the street from the balcony, looking down into it. The boulevard was one of the arteries cut through Paris under Napoleon III, and in 1880 it was still unfinished. The last few hundred metres, near the Opéra, would not be joined up until the 1920s. He painted it under snow, in the winter after he turned 31, at a moment when his friends knew him as much for buying their pictures as for painting his own. He had been taking Monet, Renoir and Degas off their hands since 1876. The canvas is in Normandy now, in the museum inside the château at Flers, whose 19th-century collection grew out of a bequest from one of the town's former mayors.