Vue de toits
Snow lying on the grey rooftops of Paris, seen from Caillebotte's own upper window — bare roofs, chimneys and nothing else.
Paris
The painting depicts a real landscape or cityscape. The precise viewpoint the artist used may be unknown, so the marker shows the general area.
Vue de toits — at a glance
- Artist
- Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894)
- Year
- 1878
- Movement
- Impressionism / Realism
- Place
- The Haussmann quarter near the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris 8e
- Viewpoint
- Caillebotte's own upper window over the apartment roofs — the quarter survives largely unchanged
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- c. 64 × 82 cm
- Now at
- Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Overview
Rooftops in the Snow is one of Gustave Caillebotte's most austere pictures, painted in 1878. It looks out from an upper window over block after block of Paris roofs under fresh snow: mansard slopes, party walls, ranks of chimney pots and stove-pipes, a few dormer windows, and a pale sky. There are no people and no street — only the roofscape. It is oil on canvas, about 64 by 82 cm, and it hangs in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
Where was Vue de toits painted?
Museum interpretation Caillebotte lived in a large apartment on the boulevard Haussmann, near the Gare Saint-Lazare and the Pont de l'Europe, in the newly rebuilt Haussmann quarter of the eighth arrondissement — the same district he painted at street level in ‘Paris Street; Rainy Day’ and ‘Le Pont de l'Europe’. Here he paints the view from an upper window over the zinc and slate roofs of those apartment blocks. The quarter and its rooftops survive largely unchanged; the picture is a high, general roofscape rather than a marked viewpoint.
What is in the painting?
The lower two-thirds is a mass of receding rooftops: steep grey-blue slate and zinc slopes, snow lying on the flatter parts and the ridges, tall brick chimney stacks bristling with pots, blank party-wall gables, a scatter of small windows. Above, a flat, heavy, snow-laden sky. The palette is almost entirely grey, white and muted brown.
Look closely
The chimney stacks
Tall brick stacks bristling with pots and stove-pipes rise all across the roofscape.
The snow on the slopes
Fresh snow lies on the flatter roofs and the ridges, picking out every edge.
The blank gables
Windowless party-wall gables show where the next block begins.
The empty sky
A flat, heavy, snow-laden sky fills the top third — no incident at all.
Analysis
Composition and technique
A high, flat sweep of overlapping roof planes filling most of the canvas, with a low, empty sky.
Scholarship Caillebotte flattens the view into interlocking geometric planes of roof and wall, the snow picking out edges and slopes. The near-abstract pattern of slopes and chimneys, and the complete absence of figures or incident, make it one of the coolest, most modern pictures of its date.
Colour and light
A narrow range of greys, whites and browns under an overcast winter sky.
The colour is deliberately drab — slate grey, zinc grey, snow white, chimney brown — with the light flat and shadowless. The restraint is the point; it is a study of a city surface in dull cold weather.
History & provenance
The painting stayed in the Caillebotte family and was given to the French state in 1894; it hangs in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
Sources
- Musée d'Orsay, Paris — collection entry for Gustave Caillebotte, ‘Vue de toits (Effet de neige)’ (1878; oil on canvas, c. 64 × 82 cm)
- Kirk Varnedoe, ‘Gustave Caillebotte’ (Yale University Press)
Related paintings
Paris Street; Rainy Day
1877
Caillebotte's great street-level view of the same quarter, from the year before.
View of Paris from Vincent's Room in the Rue Lepic
1887
Van Gogh's Montmartre roofscape of 1887 — the same high, flat rooftop subject.
Early Sunday Morning
1930
Hopper's empty American street of 1930 — the same austerity and absence of people.
More by Gustave Caillebotte
Le Pont de l'Europe
Also connected to Paris
The Massacre at Chios
Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Café du Tambourin
Luxe, Calme et Volupté