The plain of Gennevilliers, yellow fields

The flat ground in this picture was fed with the sewage of Paris. From the late 1860s the city sent its waste out to the plain of Gennevilliers to be spread over the fields, and the market gardens that grew on it supplied the same city with vegetables. Caillebotte knew the ground from his doorstep. He and his brother Martial had bought a house at Petit-Gennevilliers in 1881, on the Seine across from Argenteuil, half an hour from Paris by train, chiefly because he wanted to sail. In 1884 he painted six landscapes of that plain, pared down to bands of pink, yellow, blue and green with almost nothing in them to stand on. He gave this one to a friend in Le Havre the same year, and it stayed in that family until 2008. Melbourne bought it in 2011.