Il sentiero in salita

By 1881 Gustave Caillebotte was better known among the Impressionists as their banker than as one of their painters. He had money from a family fortune, and he spent it buying the canvases of Monet, Renoir and Degas when almost no one else would, which is much of why so many of them hang in French museums at all. His own work he showed less and less. This is one of the quieter results: a man and a woman climbing a sunlit path, their backs to us, the road rising into greenery and a few pale houses. There is none of the Paris street traffic he had painted a few years before. He was in his early thirties here, and within a dozen years he would be dead of a stroke, his collection left to the nation.