Dans un café

Caillebotte showed this at the fifth Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1880, the same year a new law loosened the rules on France's cafes as they multiplied across the city. A man in a bowler hat stands with his hands in his pockets, his jacket rumpled, staring out at nothing in particular. Behind him a large mirror doubles the room, so the seated drinkers and the marble tables appear twice and the space grows hard to read. The cafe was a favourite subject of the Impressionists and the writers around them, from Degas to Zola. This is the only one Caillebotte ever painted. It has hung in Rouen, on long-term loan from the Musée d'Orsay, since 1946.