Yellow Roses in a Vase

In the spring of 1882 Caillebotte spent weeks putting together the seventh Impressionist exhibition and coaxing people back into it after Degas had walked out with his own faction. Then he went home and painted flowers. Between 1881 and 1883 he made more than 30 still lifes, a run that coincides with Monet using his Paris studio and with the genre coming back into favour among his friends. This is a bunch of yellow roses in a plain white vase, a little over 50 centimetres tall, and he kept it. Caillebotte is usually remembered as the one who bought the others' canvases when nobody else would. After he died in 1894, at 45, this picture went to Degas, who collected his colleagues with some shrewdness.