The Yellow Fields at Gennevilliers

By 1884 Caillebotte had largely stepped back from Paris. He was independently rich, had spent years quietly buying his friends' pictures and paying to mount their exhibitions, and now spent much of his time at his property across the Seine at Petit-Gennevilliers, gardening and sailing. This is farmland near that house. A broad band of yellow field tips up toward a low sky, the paint laid on thick and bright. The composition is oddly steep, the near field sliding toward you as if seen from a slight rise. He painted a whole run of these flat local landscapes in the same stretch of country. Caillebotte was 36 here, and would give up exhibiting with the Impressionists altogether within a couple of years.