Périssoires sur l'Yerres

1877 was the year of the third Impressionist exhibition, and Caillebotte was the man quietly paying for much of it, buying his friends' canvases and helping hang the show. That same summer, at his family's estate southeast of Paris, he painted this: narrow one-man skiffs called perissoires sliding down the calm river Yerres. The rower nearest us turns his face our way, straining at the paddle, while the boaters ahead dissolve into anonymity. Caillebotte hands almost two-thirds of the canvas over to the water itself, laid down in broad bands of bright horizontal strokes that only settle into a river once you step back from it.