Gelbe Orchideen

By 1893 Caillebotte had largely stopped being the painter of grey Paris streets and become a gardener. He had settled across the Seine at Petit Gennevilliers, put up greenhouses, and traded plants and advice with Monet, who was doing the same thing upriver at Giverny. Orchids were a collectors' craze in France in those years, with nurseries importing them from the tropics and single plants fetching serious money at the Paris sales, and he grew his own under glass and painted them repeatedly in his last seasons. He died in February 1894 at 45, a few months after this canvas. No museum owns it; it is known through the catalogue of his work and through photographs.