Baigneur se préparant à plonger, bords de l'Yerres

This 1878 canvas showing a bather preparing to dive from the banks of the Yerres river is one of Caillebotte's most celebrated works on the theme of masculine leisure and the body. In the summers of 1876-78, he painted a series of bathing and boating scenes on the Yerres — a quiet tributary of the Seine flowing through the family property at Yerres, south of Paris. These canvases, showing men swimming, rowing, and relaxing at the water's edge, are remarkable for their frank depiction of the male body in leisure — a subject without precedent in Impressionism's overwhelmingly feminine figure tradition. The diver's cropped, foreshortened form is one of the most original compositions in the period.

Caillebotte renders the bather from an unusual viewpoint — looking along the bank rather than across the water — that results in a bold, foreshortened figure. The precise rendering of musculature and shadow on the green bank demonstrates his characteristic disciplined realism within an Impressionist context. The water surface below is painted in cool, reflective tones.