Fruits à l'étalage

Caillebotte painted this around 1881, and the striking thing is where he stands. He looks almost straight down onto a Paris market stall, the pears and apples and grapes laid out in their little paper nests, filling the whole surface edge to edge. It is the eye of a city where photography was changing how people framed the world, and where the vast covered markets of Les Halles fed the whole of Paris. Caillebotte, wealthy enough to buy and quietly support his Impressionist friends' work, gives a heap of shop fruit the care others reserved for portraits. He made the picture for the dining room of a friend, a notary named Albert Courtier, in the town of Meaux east of Paris.