Roses dans le jardin au Petit Gennevilliers

From 1882 until his death in 1894, Caillebotte spent increasing periods at his property in Petit-Gennevilliers, a suburb northwest of Paris on the Seine, where he maintained an extensive garden that became the primary subject of his later career. The rose garden series represents his most sustained engagement with horticulture as art subject — a personal counterpart to Monet's garden paintings at Argenteuil and Vétheuil from the same decades. Caillebotte was a passionate gardener, and the Gennevilliers rose beds were his own creation, making these paintings simultaneously portraits of a garden he had made.

Caillebotte applies paint in loose, overlapping strokes that build the mass of rose blooms without precisely delineating individual flowers. His palette is keyed to the warm pinks and creamy whites of the roses against the deep greens of foliage, the composition constructed through colour mass rather than linear description.