Gustave Caillebotte

French, 1848 - 1894

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French painter

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A woman stands on a sun-dappled path, which runs past a bank of blooming flowers and back to a cottage in this vertical painting. Close to us, the bush fills the lower right quadrant of the composition, where coral-pink and golden yellow dahlia blossoms flare like fireworks from among deep, spruce-green foliage. Sunlight from our left casts long violet-purple and steel-blue shadows across the white path, which runs parallel to the left edge of the canvas alongside a strip of trimmed lawn. In the near distance, the woman looks down at something in her hands at her chest so the brim of her hat angles down. She wears a pale blue jacket or blouse and a long, azure-blue skirt. A small black dog with wiry fur stands near the woman and looks at us. A greenhouse with a rounded, mint-green roof sits lengthwise on our right. Several windows are tipped open on the bottom half of the structure. Hedges of white, laurel-green, and peacock-blue flowers and bushes grow between the woman and the greenhouse. The house at the end of the path has a terracotta-orange roof, pale peach stucco walls, and dark orange shutters. Dense canopies of trees nestle each side of the house, and above, puffs of white clouds float against a watery, turquoise-blue sky. The artist signed and dated the painting in green in the lower left, “G. Caillebotte, 1893.”
Gustave Caillebotte, Dahlias, Garden at Petit Gennevilliers, 1893, oil on canvas, Gift of the Scharffenberger Family, 2016.48.1

Dahlias, Garden at Petit Gennevilliers

Gustave Caillebotte · 1893 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  2016.48.1

We look slightly down onto the surface of a river in which three narrow canoes, each paddled by a single person, are being rowed toward us in this horizontal landscape painting. The rowers wear white shirts rolled up to the elbows, light blue pants, and straw-yellow, wide-brimmed hats pulled down over the eyes. They sit in the bottom of their boats with legs extended and the handle of the double-bladed paddle straddling the boat over their laps. The canoe closest to us comes almost directly toward us, angled slightly to our right as it cuts through the surface of the river, its tip extending off the bottom edge of the canvas. The second canoe is a couple of boat lengths behind and to our left of the closest canoe. The third is small in the distance, near the horizon that comes three-quarters of the way up the composition. The back end of a fourth canoe and a single paddle extends into the scene from the right edge of the canvas. The butter-yellow paddles are reflected in the pale sage green and sky blue of the river’s surface. The river is lined on both sides with lush trees and vegetation, which fills the top quarter of the painting above the horizon.
Gustave Caillebotte, Skiffs, 1877, oil on canvas, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1985.64.6

Skiffs

Gustave Caillebotte · 1877 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  1985.64.6