Undergrowth

By the time he painted this in 1882, Gustave Caillebotte was quietly holding the Impressionists together. He had money the others didn't, so he bought their canvases, paid gallery rents and helped mount their shows. What he really loved, though, was gardening, and he was good at it. Unlike friends who preferred nature left wild, he wanted his beds clipped, planned and cultivated. Here that eye is turned on a garden at Trouville, a fashionable resort on the Normandy coast where Paris went to take the sea air. A year or so earlier he had bought a property up the Seine at Petit-Gennevilliers, and gardens like this one would take over more and more of his painting until his early death in 1894.