Luncheon

Caillebotte painted this lunch in 1876, in the family's grand apartment near the Paris Opera, and it is a portrait of a house in mourning. His father had died less than two years earlier, and his mother Celeste sits at the head of the table in black. Across from her his younger brother Rene eats in silence while the butler, Jean Daurelle, leans in to serve. The painter has set them against the window so their faces stay in shadow and the light gathers instead on the crystal, the carafe, the polished silver. Rene himself would be dead within three years, at 26.