Skiffs

Caillebotte painted this at his family's country estate at Yerres, southeast of Paris, where the family spent summers from the 1860s until they sold the property in 1879. The Yerres river provided the setting for a concentrated series of boating and bathing scenes that Caillebotte produced between 1877 and 1878 — among the most distinctive works of his career. Independently wealthy through an inheritance, Caillebotte was not only a painter but also a naval architect and passionate racing yachtsman who helped design competitive vessels; his interest in watercraft was technical as well as pictorial. The painting was exhibited at the fourth Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1879, listed in the catalogue as Pésissoires sur l'Yerres (flat-bottomed canoes on the Yerres). After Caillebotte's death in 1894, the work remained with his family for over seven decades before passing to Wildenstein & Co. in New York in 1966, the same year Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon acquired it. The Mellons gave the painting to the National Gallery of Art in 1985, where it entered the collection alongside other works from their remarkable gift.