Baigneur se préparant à plonger, bords de l'Yerres

The Yerres is a small river south-east of Paris where Caillebotte's wealthy family kept a country estate, and through the 1870s he painted it constantly: the rowers, the swimmers, the water itself. Here a young man in a dark bathing costume edged with red stands on a plank, seen from behind, a moment before he drops into the river. Caillebotte had trained as an engineer, and it shows in the way the body is built, solid and carefully placed, rather than dissolved into light the way his Impressionist friends liked. He painted this around 1878, near the end of his family's years at Yerres. The estate was sold soon after his mother's death, and his run of river pictures came to an end.