Les bords de la Seine près d'Argenteuil

This 1888 canvas showing the banks of the Seine near Argenteuil was painted from Caillebotte's base at Petit-Gennevilliers, directly across the river from Argenteuil, where he lived and kept his sailing boats. By the late 1880s he was largely absent from the Impressionist exhibitions but continued to paint regularly, particularly the Seine landscape around his home. The river views from this period show a relaxed, mature Impressionist practice — less strenuously original than his major urban subjects of the 1870s but accomplished and genuinely felt. The Seine's changing light and the riverside vegetation provided him with inexhaustible subject matter.

The composition is horizontal, the Seine bank stretching across the foreground with the river receding into the distance. Warm summer light is rendered in a rich palette of greens, blues, and ochres. Caillebotte's brushwork for these late landscapes is fluid and varied, without the ruled-perspective intensity of his interior and urban subjects.