Jardín en Trouville

By the 1880s the Normandy coast had become the summer edge of Paris. The railway carried city crowds to resort towns like Trouville, and painters followed them for the light, the gardens, and the sea air. Caillebotte painted this small garden there around 1882. He is often remembered less as a painter than as the wealthy friend who bought his colleagues' canvases and helped fund their exhibitions when almost no one else would, yet he worked steadily himself, mostly on the quiet, ordinary corners of modern life. Here that means a cultivated garden rather than a grand sea view, close up and domestic, the kind of spot a summer visitor would actually sit in. The picture is barely larger than a sheet of paper. It is now in Cologne, part of a collection given to the Wallraf-Richartz Museum.