Portrait of Richard Gallo

In July 1881 France passed a sweeping law on the freedom of the press, and new papers multiplied almost overnight. Caillebotte painted his childhood friend Richard Gallo that same year, seated on a richly patterned sofa in a gilded interior, arms folded, in a carefully cut black coat. Gallo was a banker's son about to start work as a journalist, and the detail that fixes the moment is the paper open across his knee. It is not the staid old title he was joining but Le Figaro, then a brash competitor riding the new freedoms. Caillebotte, rich enough that he never needed to sell a canvas, showed the portrait the following spring at the seventh Impressionist exhibition.