Garden entrance, Petit Gennevilliers

By the 1890s Caillebotte had mostly stepped away from the Paris art world he once bankrolled. He had settled across the Seine from Argenteuil at Petit Gennevilliers, where he laid out a large garden, built greenhouses, and gave his days to it and to the water. He was a champion sailor who designed racing boats. In his last years he painted the garden again and again, at the gate, along the paths, among the flowers, close to the house with its bright roof. This view dates from 1893. He died suddenly the next year, at 45, and much of what we know of that garden survives only in the canvases he made of it.