Allée de jardin et massifs de dahlias, Petit Gennevilliers

The dahlia beds at Petit-Gennevilliers appear in several of Caillebotte's late garden paintings, the garden path providing the kind of spatial recession that his earlier urban perspectives had achieved through streets and boulevards. The allée — the garden path leading into depth — was a compositional motif he found as useful in the garden as the bridges and floor-boards of his early career. Dahlias, as late summer and autumn flowers, give the Gennevilliers garden series a temporal specificity absent from his paintings of roses and more ambiguously seasonal blooms.

Caillebotte uses the garden path as a spatial organiser, its diagonal recession pulling the eye into the picture against the flat, massed colour of the dahlia beds on either side. The perspective is less extreme than his famous floor-scraper and street canvases, but the spatial dynamic of depth-versus-surface that characterises his best work operates here in a more relaxed key.