Rooftops under Snow, Paris

By 1878 Paris had just been rebuilt. Baron Haussmann's decades of demolition had replaced medieval lanes with long boulevards and rows of apartment blocks under near-identical grey roofs. Caillebotte, who had trained as an engineer and had money of his own, climbed above one of them in winter and painted what he saw looking down. There is no street here, no traffic, no figures, just a field of snow-covered slate and zinc chimneys under a heavy sky. The high, almost aerial viewpoint was rare in French painting then, and close to what the new photographers were doing from rooftops and balloons. He showed the canvas in 1879 at the fourth Impressionist exhibition, among the 25 works he brought that year.