Interior, Woman at the Window

This is a Paris apartment in 1880, on one of the wide new boulevards that had recently been cut through the old city. A man sits in an armchair with his newspaper. A woman stands at the tall window in a dark dress, her back to him, looking down at the street, and Caillebotte lets that silence settle in cool blue-grey light. He was an unusual figure among the Impressionists: wealthy, trained as an engineer, he spent much of his fortune buying his friends' canvases and paying to mount their exhibitions, and he painted the modern middle-class world he actually lived in rather than the countryside. The carved window catch and the polished parquet are the furnishings of that new bourgeois Paris, and the woman at the glass, turned from the man and the room, looks straight out into it.