Henri Cordier

Gustave Caillebotte is remembered now for Paris streets and rowers, but in 1883 he painted this portrait of a friend, the scholar Henri Cordier. Cordier was a specialist in China who had lived there through the early 1870s and taught the history and languages of the Far East in Paris. Caillebotte catches him at work, bent over his desk mid-thought, hemmed in by books and papers. The framing is deliberately odd. Cordier is cut off at the waist and pushed to one side, the rest of the space filled with the clutter of his study, an experimental cropping that shows how close Caillebotte stood to Degas. The portrait entered the Musée d'Orsay in 1986.