The Hill of Colombes

In 1884 Colombes was still a village of fields and orchards on the Seine, just north-west of Paris and next to Petit-Gennevilliers, where Caillebotte kept his house on the river. Trains from the Gare Saint-Lazare had stopped there since the middle of the century, yet the land on its slope was still farmed in narrow strips. Caillebotte painted it from the flat meadows by the river. A broad field of young green crop fills most of the canvas, a dirt track curves through it on the left, and behind it the rising ground is divided into bands of tilled earth, with one small house standing on its own. Along the top runs a line of fruit trees in white blossom, the apple and cherry orchards that then covered the upper slope. Over the following decades Colombes filled with factories and housing, and in 1924 it held the main stadium of the Paris Olympic Games.