Caillebotte depicted the everyday experience of the late 19th century Parisian bourgeois. His records on daily life, which contain observations about autobiographic bourgeois interior scenes, Parisian public spaces, and daily commodities found on streets, visualize the discourse on the late 19th century bourgeois consumer culture which heralds the forthcoming of consumer industrial society.
In the interior scenes depicting the daily life of a bourgeois family, he shows the relationship between the consumer goods and the bourgeois consumer, and a new condition of daily life brought by modern high-story apartments. 〈The Luncheon〉(l876) proposes the image of the human being which is reduced to the image of the consumer by the consumer ideology, and the image of the fetishistic consumption which dominates the bourgeois daily life. Works treating views from apartments, including 〈Young Man at His Window〉(1876), 〈Interior, Woman at a Window〉(1880), and 〈Man on a Balcony, Boulevard Haussmann〉(1880), contain observations about modern conditions of life in apartments in which the spectacular view of streets through the windows becomes a high value object of consumption.
Works depicting daily scenes of Parisian streets, including 〈Paris Street, Rainy Day〉(1877), show the making of Parisian public space as a spectacle by the consumer industry which entices the passers-by. Through the images of flanerie in the streets of Paris, Caillebotte presented the aspect of modern culture of consumption in which the individual becomes a consumer lured by the spectacle created by the consumer industry, and at the same time a part of the spectacle itself.
In early 1880s, Caillebotte explored the nature of modern culture of consumption in the still life series depicting food products displayed on the shop windows. 〈Still Life with Spiny Lobster〉(ca.1880-1882) shows that the challenge on the border between daily life and art has become an aspect of the modern consumer culture through obscuring of the border between the daily consumer goods and art works by the display techniques used for tempting the consumers. 〈Calf in a Butcher’s Shop〉(1882) observed the strategy of the consumer goods which conceal their original use and masquerade as objects promoting the consumer’s desire. Works like 〈Cakes〉(1882) which pay attention on the pattern of the same products displayed together repetitively, foresee the standardized mass consuming pattern of the forthcoming society of mass consumption.
Thus, Caillebotte focused on the spectacles created by the daily consumer goods displayed on the late 19th century Parisian shop windows, and proposed the images presenting the ideology of modern culture of consumption.