Field at the Seashore

In the early 1880s the Normandy coast around Trouville was filling up with Parisians, and Caillebotte spent his summers there, drawn above all by the sailing and the regattas. When he painted, though, he mostly left the beaches and their fashionable crowds alone and set up his easel on the higher ground above the sea. This canvas from 1882 looks out in just that way. A rough fence of wooden poles runs across a sunlit meadow, with a dark band of shade along the bottom edge, and beyond it the water is scattered with a dozen or more sails. The one person in the picture is a small dark figure standing by the fence. The exact spot has never been pinned down. His signature sits in the shaded grass at the lower right.