耶尔河，雨中效果

Caillebotte made this in 1875 at his family's country estate on the Yerres, a small river southeast of Paris where he spent his summers rowing and swimming. What is remarkable is how much he left out. There is almost no landscape and no people, just the surface of the water filling the whole tall canvas, stippled all over with the concentric rings of falling rain. The vertical shape, the flattened pattern, and the daring emptiness owe a great deal to the Japanese woodblock prints then arriving in France. Look to the far bank and you can just make out a single small rowing boat, perhaps his own, the only solid thing in a picture that is otherwise all water and weather.