Retratos no campo

In 1876 Caillebotte was doing two things at once for the young Impressionists. He was buying his friends' pictures to keep them afloat, and he was painting his own. This one stays close to home, in the garden of his family's summer place at Yerres, south of Paris. Four women sit in the shade of the afternoon, three bent over needlework, the fourth reading further back. They are his relatives, and the figure deep in the garden, absorbed in her book, is his mother. He showed it at the Impressionist exhibition of 1877, where the reception was mixed. Years later he gave the canvas to his cousin as a wedding present, and it has stayed in the Normandy town of Bayeux ever since.