Los girasoles, jardín en Petit Gennevilliers

By the mid-1880s Caillebotte had quietly stepped back from the Paris art world he had helped run. For years he had used his private fortune to organize the Impressionist shows and buy his friends' work, and now he spent more of his time across the river at Petit Gennevilliers, gardening and building boats. This is a corner of that garden, painted around 1885, a stand of sunflowers rising taller than a person. Back then these were grown purely as ornamentals, and both he and his friend Monet were fond of them. He painted the flowers from below, so the heavy heads lean over the top of the canvas and you look up into the tangle of stalks and leaves.