Gardeners

Caillebotte painted this in the mid-1870s at his family's estate at Yerres, southeast of Paris, where he spent summers and grew genuinely obsessed with gardening. Two workers tend a walled kitchen garden. One waters the rows from a heavy metal can, and if you look at his feet he is barefoot, probably to keep from crushing the young plants as he steps between them. Caillebotte was the wealthy man of the Impressionist circle, the one who bought his friends' canvases and paid for their exhibitions. He gave this plain scene of hired garden work the care other painters kept for history and myth, and pictures like it hung at the very shows he helped fund.