Апельсиновые деревья

Caillebotte painted this in 1878, outdoors in the garden of his family's country place at Yerres, south-east of Paris. The man reading with his back to us is his brother Martial. The young woman standing by the tree is their cousin Zoé. The orange trees themselves sit in square wooden boxes, the kind of formal planter that had been fashionable in French gardens since Versailles. That detail says something about the painter. Caillebotte was a passionate gardener, but unlike Monet, who wanted his grounds to look wild, he liked things clipped, trained and orderly, and he pruned his own fruit trees to keep them compact. So this is an Impressionist summer scene of dappled shade and bright lawn, but arranged with a very deliberate, geometric calm. It was his last full season at Yerres. The family sold the estate soon after, and he never painted the garden again.