Man on a Balcony, Boulevard Haussmann

The wide, straight boulevard this man looks down on was barely 20 years old when Caillebotte painted it in 1880. Baron Haussmann had spent the 1850s and 1860s cutting these long avenues through medieval Paris on the emperor's orders, replacing crooked lanes with uniform stone facades and open sightlines. Caillebotte knew this particular stretch from the inside. His well-off family kept an apartment on the boulevard Haussmann, and the ornate iron railing in the foreground is his own. He puts a gentleman in a top hat and dark coat with his back to us, one hand near the rail, simply watching the traffic and the light on the new stone. Caillebotte was rich enough to paint whatever he liked, and he spent much of his money quietly buying his friends' Impressionist canvases.