Cottage in Trouville

In the spring of 1882, Caillebotte helped organise the seventh Impressionist exhibition in Paris, quietly paying to keep the group's shows going while his friends painted the city's boulevards. That same year he set up his easel far from those streets, on the Normandy coast at Trouville, a seaside resort where fashionable Parisians went for the sea air. This is one of the canvases he brought back: a plain cottage among greenery, painted for himself rather than for a buyer. Caillebotte had the rare freedom to do exactly that. A family fortune meant he never needed to sell, so he could follow a summer's light across a wall wherever it caught his interest. The picture stayed in private hands in Paris for the rest of his life. It now hangs on the far side of the world, in Tokyo.