Young Man at His Window

Gustave Caillebotte

Oil on canvas

J. Paul Getty Museum

Young Man at His Window (French: Jeune homme à sa fenêtre) depicts the artist's brother, René Caillebotte, standing with his back to the viewer at a large open window of the family's apartment on the Rue de Miromesnil in Paris, gazing out at Boulevard Malesherbes below. The composition masterfully conjoins a richly appointed bourgeois interior—anchored by a plush red satin armchair—with a sun-drenched Haussmann street scene rendered in a precisely geometric, realist style that distinguished Caillebotte from the looser brushwork of his Impressionist peers. Caillebotte (1848–1894) trained formally and brought an engineer's eye for perspective and spatial construction to his canvases, producing work described by scholars as a sharp-edged urban realism that anticipated later developments in photography and cinema. The painting was first exhibited to critical acclaim at the second Impressionist exhibition of 1876 and is now widely considered a masterpiece of nineteenth-century modern realism.