Balcone, boulevard Haussmann

Caillebotte and his brother Martial took a sixth-floor flat at 31 boulevard Haussmann in 1879, the year after their mother died. In the spring of 1880 he organised and largely paid for the fifth Impressionist exhibition, and in the same year he made a run of pictures looking steeply down from the windows and balconies of that flat. The street he was looking at was among the newest in Paris. The boulevard had been named for Georges-Eugene Haussmann in 1864, while he was still cutting it through the old city, and it was not yet finished. The last few hundred metres, near the boulevard des Italiens, opened only in 1926. Caillebotte was 32, living on money his father had made supplying bedding to the French army.