Boulevard vu d'en haut

Caillebotte painted this in 1880, and its whole subject is the strange new vantage of the modern city. He stood on a high balcony of a Paris apartment building and looked straight down, so that the boulevard tips up almost flat and the people on the pavement shrink to hats and shadows. A single tree spreads across the middle of the picture, seen from above as a rough green circle, something no earlier painter had much reason to show. Caillebotte was wealthy enough to live behind exactly this kind of railing on the wide new streets Baron Haussmann had cut through the city. The picture stayed in private hands and is rarely seen in public.