Halévy Street, View from the Seventh Floor

Paris in 1878 was barely a decade out of Baron Haussmann's rebuilding, its medieval tangle replaced by long straight boulevards and pale stone apartment blocks. Caillebotte, who was rich enough never to need to sell a canvas, kept climbing to the top-floor windows of those new buildings to paint the city from above. Here he looks steeply down a short street toward the Opera Garnier, finished only three years earlier, which you can pick out by the gilded figures on its roof. The plunging angle and the tilted window frame pull your eye down into the street the way a camera might. He sent it to the Impressionists' fourth show the next year, its colours pared back to blues and violets and left deliberately unfinished.