Caillebotte, Gustave (1848-1894)
Le Bateau jaune (The Yellow Boat)
1891
Oil on canvas, 73 x 92.5 cm
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena
The wealthiest member of the Impressionist circle, Caillebotte helped finance the group’s exhibitions and actively collected the work of his friends in the 1870s and early 1880s. By the late 1880s, however, his attention had shifted to designs for the gardens and boats he kept at a country house in Gennevilliers, twenty miles down the Seine from central Paris. The yellow boat depicted here was likely one of the artist’s own design, and may show Caillebotte’s friend and fellow sailor, Eugène Lamy, at the helm. The composition, abandoned unfinished in 1891, depicts a stretch of the river not far from the painter’s house. (Norton Simon)