Sunflowers along the Seine

In February 1888 a Brussels exhibiting society called Les XX, the Twenty, opened its fifth annual show. The group made a point of inviting the boldest painters from abroad, and a year earlier it had hung Seurat's Sunday on La Grande Jatte. In 1888 Caillebotte was among the guests, and this canvas was number five in the catalogue. He had painted it two or three years before at Gennevilliers, on the Seine just outside Paris. A row of sunflowers fills the whole front of the picture and towers over the view behind it, the sparkling river and a long white floating pavilion moored against the far bank. The painting later passed through the Paris dealer Ambroise Vollard. It came to San Francisco in 2013, bequeathed by Diana Dollar Knowles, a former trustee of the city's museums, who had bought it at auction in New York in 1992.