Bagnanti

Caillebotte painted this in the summer of 1878 on his family's estate at Yerres, a river town about 20 kilometres south of Paris where he spent his summers. A young man in a dark bathing costume stands on the bank with his back to us, arms lifting, about to plunge into the water. Another wades out, a third swims, a boatman drifts past behind. Caillebotte was unusual among the Impressionists. He had money, and he quietly used it to buy his friends' paintings and to pay the rent on their exhibitions when sales were thin. This large canvas went on the wall of the fourth of those shows, in 1879, hung among the smaller riverside scenes he made that same summer at Yerres.