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Signed and dated G. Caillebotte 1891 (lower left)

Oil on canvas

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by the Comité Gustave Caillebotte.
PROVENANCE

André Maurice, Paris
Galerie Matthiesen, London (by 1957)
Estate of the Late Lord Sieff of Brimpton (sold: Sotheby's, London, June 26, 2001, lot 1)
Richard Green Gallery, London (aquired at the above sale)

EXHIBITED

Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Park und Garten in der Malerei, vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, 1957, no. 59
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

Marie Berhaut, Gustave Caillebotte, sa vie et son oeuvre. Catalogue raisonné des peintures et pastels, Paris, 1978, no. 375, illustrated
Marie Berhaut, Gustave Caillebotte, Catalogue raisonné des peintures et pastels, Paris, 1994, no. 405, illustrated p. 222 (as dating from 1890)
CATALOGUE NOTE

The Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte is perhaps most famous for the richness and realism of his paintings. His amazing talent for rendering spatial perspective, combined with his use of rich color, resulted in some of the most extraordinary compositions of the Impressionist movement. Although Caillebotte devoted much of his production during the 1870s and 1880s to depicting the architecture and boulevards of Paris, by the 1890s he turned his attention to painting the grounds of his family home at Petit Gennevilliers. Here he created a magnificent garden and elaborate greenhouse where he cultivated exotic species of flora, including a variety of orchids. The inherent beauty of this landscape resulted in several lush and intimate depictions of his personal surroundings.

Le Jardin du Petit Gennevilliers, les toits roses truly reflects Caillebotte's love for his garden. In previous works the artist had depicted gardens as an extension of the bourgeois home, concentrating mainly on the structure and architectural elements of the house. But after the purchase of his villa in Gennevilliers his interest in painting flora as the central component of the composition began to parallel his interest in gardening. Pierre Wittmer comments: "The garden at Petit Gennevilliers became a horticultural laboratory and an artist's studio, where the experimental propagation of plants provided the subject matter for paintings which recorded the passage of the seasons through the cycle of their plants. In Spring Caillebotte depicted clumps of hyacinths, a group of multicoloured pansies along the edge off a small lawn, as well as vases of cut flowers... In Autumn, his attention turned to his dahlias, grown in the bed laid out to the south-west of the house, and chrysanthemums" (Pierre Wittmer, "Note on Caillebotte as an Horticulturalist," Gustave Caillebotte, The Unknown Impressionist, London, 1996, pp. 204 & 205).