Les Soleils, jardin du Petit Gennevilliers

Les Soleils, jardin du Petit Gennevilliers by Gustave Caillebotte, painted in 1885 and now at the Musée d'Orsay, depicts the sunflower garden at Petit Gennevilliers, the riverside property near Paris where Caillebotte spent increasing amounts of time from the mid-1880s onward, tending his garden and sailing on the Seine. The sunflower subject connects Caillebotte to both the Impressionist interest in close observation of the natural world and the broader European fascination with the sunflower as a symbol of artistic modernity — van Gogh would famously paint his Sunflowers series two years later. Caillebotte's treatment is more photographic and less stylistically assertive than van Gogh's, but no less attentive to the plant's visual richness.

The close viewpoint and upward-looking angle of the composition place the sunflowers against the sky, isolating their forms as both botanical specimens and decorative shapes. Caillebotte's technique is more conventionally naturalistic than his fellow Impressionists — the painting has a precision of observation that reflects his engineering training alongside his aesthetic sensitivity. The yellow of the sunflower petals is rendered with controlled chromatic intensity rather than the expressive exaggeration van Gogh would later apply to the subject.