Orchids in the Greenhouse at Petit Gennevilliers

By 1893 Gustave Caillebotte had largely left Paris behind. The painter of wet city boulevards and men planing a parquet floor had moved out to Petit-Gennevilliers, a village on the Seine below Argenteuil, where he sat on the town council, built and raced sailing boats, and above all gardened. He put up a heated greenhouse and grew orchids in it, the difficult, showy kind that Parisian collectors prized, and then he painted them. This is one of those close-up studies, the flowers pressed right up to the front of the picture. He worked from his own plants, in his own glasshouse, at his own pace, no longer showing much with the Impressionists he had once helped bankroll. He didn't have long. In February 1894 he died suddenly of a stroke, at 45, with these orchids among the last things he painted.