Bootspartie

In the 1870s, weekend rowing on the rivers around Paris became the fashionable thing to do, and Gustave Caillebotte, wealthy and a keen oarsman himself, kept painting it. Here he does something few of his friends dared. Instead of watching the boat from the bank, he puts you inside it, on the seat facing a man in a black top hat and shirtsleeves who pulls at the oars and looks straight back at you. The water tilts up steeply and the near oar almost reaches your knee. He showed the picture at the Impressionist exhibition of 1879. It stayed in private hands for well over a century, and in 2020 France declared it a national treasure, then bought it for the Musee d'Orsay in 2022 for 43 million euros.