La Place Saint-Augustin in the fog

The square is barely twenty years older than the painting. Place Saint-Augustin was cut out of this quarter during Haussmann's rebuilding of Paris, and the church that anchors it was finished in 1871 by Victor Baltard, who had just put up the iron market sheds at Les Halles. He used the same engineering here, a cast-iron frame carrying the dome, wrapped in stone so that it reads as an ordinary church from the street. Caillebotte grew up a few minutes away on the rue de Miromesnil and moved in 1878 to the boulevard Haussmann, so this was his own quarter in fog. That year the Impressionists held no exhibition at all. The Exposition Universelle had taken over Paris from May to November, and they waited until 1879 to show again. The canvas is small, about 54 by 65 centimetres, and it is still privately owned.