Las piraguas

A perissoire is a narrow, flat-bottomed canoe, quick to tip, and in the 1870s gliding one along a calm river had become a fashionable Sunday pastime for Parisians escaping the city. Caillebotte knew the boats intimately. He was a keen sailor who would later design racing yachts, and he painted this on the Yerres, the small river running past his family's country estate southeast of Paris. He tilts the view sharply downward, so the skiffs slide across the canvas and the water fills almost the whole frame, a daring, off-balance angle he may have taken from Japanese prints. He showed it at the Impressionist exhibition of 1879. Caillebotte was also the group's quiet patron, wealthy enough to buy his friends' unsold canvases when no one else would.