Villas at Trouville

By the early 1880s Gustave Caillebotte was spending his summers on the Normandy coast, sailing in regattas and painting between races. Trouville was a fashionable seaside resort, and he set himself up above the town, on the cliffs, looking down. That downward, tilted view is the thing to notice. He had built his reputation on Paris streets seen from a high balcony, the pavement dropping away beneath the viewer, and here he does the same to a stretch of coast. The brick villas near the centre of town tip toward a blue-green sea under a broken sky. These were private houses with their own piece of shoreline, a retreat for people who could afford one. He laid the paint on thick in the foreground and let it thin to almost nothing out on the distant water.