Still Life with Crayfish

By the early 1880s Gustave Caillebotte was pulling back from the Paris art world he had done so much to fund. He had paid for exhibitions and bought his friends' canvases when almost no one else would, and now, in his early thirties, he was spending more of his time at his house on the Seine, boating and gardening. In these years he painted a run of still lifes built around food: oysters, a calf's head in a butcher's window, fruit laid out on a stand. This plate of crayfish belongs with them. Nothing is being told here. It is close attention to a few things on a table, with a bottle and a knife beside them. He kept this one for himself, and it stayed in his own collection until he died in 1894, at the age of 45.