Halévy Street, View from the Seventh Floor

This vertiginous view looking down from the seventh floor onto the Halévy Street — one of the grand boulevards carved through Paris by Haussmann — is among Caillebotte's most audacious compositions. Painted in 1878, just two years after his celebrated Paris Street; Rainy Day, it pushes his exploration of extreme perspective even further: the viewer hovers above the street, the pedestrians reduced to small figures navigating the wide, wet pavement below. The work engages directly with the disorienting scale of the renovated city, where the new building heights created precisely this kind of aerial perspective unavailable in the older, narrower Paris.

The composition plunges steeply downward with almost no middle ground — balcony, then immediately the street far below. Buildings recede sharply at left. Figures are abbreviated impressionistically, while the architecture is rendered with precise structural clarity. The palette is cool and overcast.