Young Man at His Window

A young man stands with his back to us, hands in his pockets, looking down at a Paris boulevard. We never learn what he is watching. That small mystery is the whole charge of the picture.

The story behind the painting

Gustave Caillebotte painted this oil on canvas, 117 by 82 cm, in 1876. The model is his brother, René Caillebotte, standing at a window of the family home on the Rue de Miromesnil in Paris. It is a fairly early work in Caillebotte's career and shows his interest in urban Realism. He showed it at the Impressionist exhibition of 1876, alongside a few of his other works, including The Floor Scrapers.

What to look for

René wears informal clothes and stands at the balcony, seen from behind and set off-center. Beyond him, Boulevard Malesherbes cuts across as a large oblique street, painted in detail. The viewpoint is slightly raised, and strong perspective diagonals pull the eye from the dark figure out into the bright street. The art historian Kirk Varnedoe describes a tense relationship between the foreground figure, those diagonals and the street scene beyond.

Meaning and intent

A figure seen from behind at a window has roots in German Romanticism, as in Caspar David Friedrich's Woman at the Window of 1822. But Caillebotte's man looks at a city, not at nature. Varnedoe notes that we usually enjoy wondering what a window gazer sees, while here the structure replaces that curiosity with something charged and seemingly unprecedented. Emile Zola admired the technique but disliked the style, calling the picture anti-artistic because of the exactness of its copying.

Legacy

The painting was long in the collection of Edwin L. Cox and is classed as a National Treasure of France. In 2021 it was sold at Christie's in New York to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Getty's first work by Caillebotte, and it set a new auction record for the artist. Wikidata lists both the Cox Collection and the Getty as its collections, reflecting this history.