Chrysanthemums in a Vase

White, deep red and yellow chrysanthemums crowd the top of this small canvas, cut and pushed into a slender blue-and-white vase against a plain, loosely brushed ground. Caillebotte grew flowers like these himself, at his house at Petit-Gennevilliers on the Seine, northwest of Paris, where he had added a studio and a greenhouse. In 1893 he painted chrysanthemums several times, growing in the beds outside and, as here, cut and brought indoors. The picture belongs to a private collection. The garden it came from no longer exists. The property later ended up inside the grounds of the Gnome et Rhône engine works, and the house was destroyed in an air raid in 1944. Much of what we know about how it looked comes from photographs his brother Martial took there in the early 1890s.