Jeune homme jouant du piano (Martial Caillebotte)

The young man at the keyboard is the painter's younger brother, Martial Caillebotte, and the room is the family's comfortable Paris apartment. Gustave Caillebotte showed this at the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876, when the group was still an object of ridicule and most of its members were short of money. Caillebotte was the exception. He had inherited a fortune, and he quietly bought his friends' pictures and paid the bills that kept the exhibitions running. Here he stays inside a warm bourgeois interior, the light catching the polished wood of the piano and the patterned wallpaper, his brother bent over the keys and lost in the music.