Halévy Street, View from the Seventh Floor

This painting is one of three works Caillebotte made looking down onto the Rue Halévy, the street that runs alongside the Palais Garnier — the Paris opera house completed in 1875 and the centerpiece of Baron Haussmann's transformation of the city. Caillebotte painted the series from the upper floors of apartment buildings near the intersection with the Rue La Fayette, exploiting an extreme downward angle that compresses perspective and flattens the street into an almost abstract pattern of rooftops and carriageway. The Rue Halévy series belongs to Caillebotte's sustained project of depicting Haussmann-era Paris — wide new boulevards, uniform stone façades, and the disorienting scale of the rebuilt city — from vantage points unavailable to earlier generations of painters. The 1877 date places it in the same year Caillebotte organized the third Impressionist exhibition and showed what would become his most celebrated work, Paris Street; Rainy Day.