The Swimmer

Caillebotte made this in 1877 at his family's estate south-east of Paris, on the little river Yerres where he spent summers swimming and rowing. He was that rare thing among the Impressionists, a rich man who bankrolled their shows and painted seriously himself. The subject looks plain enough, a man in the water. What was new was making it a man at all. Painters of the day treated the bather as a female subject, something to be looked at, and Caillebotte's swimmer, worked in soft pastel, is instead just a body caught mid-stroke in cold green water. He came back to these Yerres bathers more than once that season.