Boat harbor near Port-Marly

Caillebotte was an accomplished competitive sailor and rower who painted river sport as an insider. His boating scenes, painted along the Seine at Argenteuil and Yerres, use extreme perspectival foreshortening — boats seen from directly above, figures cropped at canvas edges — to create spatially vertiginous compositions that are among Impressionism's most formally radical achievements His financial support of the Impressionist movement — through purchasing and organizing exhibitions — complemented his own formally adventurous painting practice.

Caillebotte combined Impressionist color sensibility with a precise, almost photographic realism derived from academic training. His compositions use bold perspectival recession — often from elevated viewpoints — with smooth, carefully blended brushwork.