Les Rives de la Seine

By the late 1880s Caillebotte had largely left the Paris he was famous for painting and settled at Petit Gennevilliers, a small riverside spot half an hour by train from the city, where he sailed, gardened and built boats. The Seine here was plain working country. This is one of a small group of canvases he made between about 1888 and 1892 of laundry hung out to dry along the bank, the white sheets catching the light against the water. He had stopped exhibiting with the Impressionists and no longer needed to sell anything. These late riverside pictures were made for himself, in the last years before he died suddenly in 1894, at 45.