Young Man at His Window

The man with his hands in his pockets, looking down into the street, is the painter's younger brother, René Caillebotte. He stands at an open window of the family's comfortable apartment near the Rue de Miromesnil in Paris, out over the new Boulevard Malesherbes. That view is the real subject. Baron Haussmann's rebuilding of Paris had just cut these wide, straight boulevards through the old city, and Caillebotte paints the fresh stone and the emptied, sunlit perspective as a modern person actually experienced it, from a private room, at a slight remove. He showed the picture in 1876 at the second Impressionist exhibition, though his own touch is far tighter and more precise than Monet's or Renoir's. René died young a few years after this was painted. Look at how firmly the figure's feet are planted apart, the pose of someone who owns the room and half expects to own the street.