Portrait of a Seated Woman Reading

By 1888 Caillebotte had mostly stepped away from the Paris art world. He had stopped showing with the Impressionists years before, and that year he settled for good at Petit-Gennevilliers, a village on the Seine just outside Paris, where he gave his days to gardening and to building and racing yachts. This canvas comes from that quieter life. A woman sits reading indoors, unhurried, the picture painted for no exhibition and no client. The light is domestic and the pose is ordinary. Caillebotte had once painted the wide new boulevards of the city in steep perspective, full of traffic and iron. Here the world has narrowed to one room and a single person with a book, the kind of afternoon that filled his last years. He was 40, and had six left to live.