Voiliers à Argenteuil

By 1888 Gustave Caillebotte had mostly stepped away from Paris and the Impressionist circle he'd once helped bankroll. He'd settled across the Seine at Petit-Gennevilliers and thrown himself into sailing, not just as a pastime but as a designer, drawing hulls and racing the boats he built. So when he painted this row of pleasure craft moored at Argenteuil, under the piers of the railway bridge, he was working from something he understood from the inside. The subject was almost old-fashioned by then. Monet and Renoir had painted these same reaches of the river 15 years earlier. What holds it together is the rigging, the tall verticals of the masts pinned against the long horizontal of the bridge behind.