Calf's Head and Ox Tongue

By the early 1880s Paris had turned the display of food into a kind of theatre. The vast iron halls of Les Halles fed the city, and butchers dressed their windows with real showmanship. Caillebotte, who was wealthy enough never to have to sell a painting, took that everyday sight and made something deliberately unsettling of it around 1882. A calf's head and an ox tongue hang against a pale ground, raw and about to be cooked. Most of his fellow Impressionists were painting flowers and fruit that a buyer could hang over the dining table. He instead cropped in tight on butcher's meat, then softened it with pastel pinks and loose, decorative brushwork, so the thing repels and attracts at once. He is thought to have taken the subject from the shop that stood directly below his family's Paris apartment.