Goldlack

By his last years Caillebotte had largely left behind the Paris streets and the rowing scenes that made his name, and settled across the Seine at Petit-Gennevilliers, downstream from Argenteuil. There he became a gardener as much as a painter, much like his friend Monet, building greenhouses and raising orchids beside rows of ordinary flowers, then painting them up close. Wallflowers, the modest early-spring bloom this canvas is named for, were exactly that kind of plain garden plant rather than a florist's showpiece. No firm date has been pinned to the picture, and it stays in private hands. Caillebotte died suddenly in 1894, only 45, with the garden and its flowers among the last things he kept painting.