Vista attraverso un balcone

By 1880 Baron Haussmann's boulevards had remade Paris into the city of wide stone avenues we still walk, and Caillebotte lived above one of them. For this picture he did something odd. He painted the view from inside his flat, looking out through the black wrought-iron curls of his own balcony railing, so the ironwork spreads its pattern across the whole canvas and the street beyond goes soft. Down on Boulevard Haussmann you can make out a carriage, a round advertising column, a few passersby. The steep, cropped angle came from the Japanese prints then reaching Paris. Van Gogh, hearing of Caillebotte, once asked his brother Theo to describe what such paintings looked like.