Landscape at Argenteuil

By 1889 Caillebotte had largely stepped back from the Paris art world. Wealthy enough not to need sales, he had spent years buying and defending his friends' Impressionist pictures, and in 1887 he moved out to Petit-Gennevilliers on the Seine, across the water from Argenteuil, to garden, build boats, and paint what was around him. This view looks over the flat riverside plain toward the village. It is an unhurried picture of a place he saw every day. He gave it to a cousin, Zoe, whose wedding at Bayeux he had witnessed two years earlier, which is how it came to rest in a museum in that Normandy town rather than in Paris. Caillebotte died young, at 45, only five years after painting it.