Ruderer auf der Yerres

Caillebotte painted this in 1877 at his family's country estate on the river Yerres, south-east of Paris, where he spent his summers rowing. What was new was the vantage point. Instead of watching the boats from the bank, he puts you inside one, right behind an oarsman whose broad back and arms fill the foreground, as if you were the next man on the bench. It is a framing closer to photography than to older river scenes, and it feels startlingly immediate. Caillebotte was unusual among the Impressionists, trained partly as an engineer and wealthy enough that he never needed to sell his work. That same year he helped organise and pay for the group's third exhibition, and over his life he bought his friends' canvases when few others would. That collection became one of the founding blocks of Impressionism in France's national museums.