This painting presents a young man in a dark suit standing at a large open window in a well-appointed upper-story apartment. With his back to the viewer, his feet planted firmly apart and hands in his pockets, he looks out at a sun-drenched street scene tightly framed by tall, uniform apartment blocks. Beneath him, a lone woman in fashionable attire is about to cross the street, and several horse-drawn carriages complete the urban tableau.
When Caillebotte first exhibited the painting, he presented it not as a portrait but as a genre scene, with the title Jeune homme à sa fenêtre (Young Man at His Window). For his model, Caillebotte used his brother René and the family’s newly-built apartment building at the corner of the rue de Lisbonne and rue de Miromesnil in the 8th arrondissement of Paris.
This expensive and fashionable quarter had been completely transformed by the urban renewal project initiated by Baron Haussmann, prefect of the Seine, and by real-estate speculation, in which Caillebotte’s recently deceased father Martial had been a major participant. It is this distinctly modern and bourgeois Paris that Caillebotte's painting evokes.Caillebotte exhibited the picture to acclaim at the 2nd Impressionist exhibition in 1876, when he was just twenty-seven years old.
It was his public debut as a painter, and among his submissions this painting received the most critical attention, after his famous Floor Scrapers (Musée d’Orsay, Paris). The 1876 exhibition prompted critic and novelist Edmond Duranty to write his landmark essay, “The New Painting,” which strongly advocated for the realist depiction of modern urban life. Though he doesn't name any artists, it is clear that Caillebotte's work was among his primary models.
Text: J. Paul Getty Trust, CC BY 4.0.
