Villa at Trouville

Caillebotte first came up to the Normandy coast in June 1880 and went back every summer for the next few years, sailing in the regattas along the Channel and painting between races. Roughly 50 canvases came out of those stays, many of them looking at exactly what this one looks at, the villas standing above the beach where well-off Parisians spent their summers. Trouville had been filling up with those houses since the railway from Paris reached the coast in 1863. Caillebotte knew that world from the inside. His father had made a fortune supplying the French army with beds and bedding, and while Monet and Renoir were hunting for buyers, Caillebotte was paying for the group's exhibitions and buying his friends' canvases. This one is dated 1882, the year of the seventh of those shows, and it is still in private hands.