Rue Halévy, View from the Sixth Floor

In many of his Parisian city scenes, Gustave Caillebotte focused on the window as a psychological threshold—a visual boundary between the private, protected space of the bourgeois interior and the anonymous world of the street. Here, the viewer’s location on the balcony makes the urban panorama the sole subject of the painting. The unusually high vantage point creates a visual pull into depth, further intensified by the steeply angled window frame to the left—the only element connected to the interior space behind it. The center of the composition is dominated by the vertical ascent of the Rue Halévy toward the Opéra Garnier. Rendered as a flat, light-colored form in thick brushstrokes, the street is punctuated only by the blurred figures of pedestrians and carriages. Both the perspective and the haziness of the image recall Claude Monet’s painting Boulevard des Capucines (find it in our Archive), which Caillebotte certainly knew and had possibly already seen at the first Impressionist Exhibition in 1874. Two years later Caillebotte moved into an apartment in the block of buildings on the right.

Gustave Caillebotte was an amazing painter and one of the least known among the Impressionists. If you would like to learn more about him, please check our Mega-Impressionism Course here.  :) 

P.S. Here you can take an another intimate glimpse of gloomy Parisian rooftops painted by Caillebotte. Careful, it might get chilly.  :)