Périssoires sur l'Yerres

In the 1870s the well-off of Paris took to the rivers just outside the city on weekends, and rowing became a fashionable middle-class sport. Caillebotte knew it first-hand, since his family owned an estate on the Yerres southeast of Paris, and over 1877 and 1878 he painted a whole series of the swimmers, fishermen and canoeists there. This is one of the largest. Four men drive their narrow one-man skiffs across the still water, and Caillebotte lines them up on a steep diagonal so the boats seem to slide right out of the frame, an effect he took from photography. He kept the far bank a soft blur of green and put all the crispness into the near boat and its rower.