Branch of the seine, effect in autumn

This is the small arm of the Seine at Petit-Gennevilliers, the riverside hamlet downstream of Paris where Caillebotte had settled for good two years earlier. The flat land just behind that bank was, by 1890, the receiving end of the capital's sewers. Paris had begun pumping its waste water out onto the plain of Gennevilliers in 1872, and the market gardens that grew on it became famously productive, worth thousands of francs a hectare where ordinary ground made a few hundred. Doctors were still arguing in print about the typhoid and the fevers that came with the arrangement. Caillebotte painted this backwater over and over in his last years, in autumn, in flood, and once with the village washing spread out on the bank to dry. Since 2001 it has hung in Cologne, part of a permanent loan of around 170 Impressionist pictures from the Swiss collectors Gérard and Marisol Corboud.