Prairie, Yerres

Prairie, Yerres at the Artizon Museum in Tokyo was painted at the Caillebotte family estate at Yerres, south of Paris, where Gustave and his brother Martial spent summers throughout the 1870s. The Yerres property, with its river, lawns, and gardens, was the setting for some of Caillebotte's most intimate and personal works — the opposite end of his practice from the vertiginous Paris street scenes. The open meadow of the estate, a subject of pure landscape observation stripped of the social observation and structural drama of his city paintings, shows a different, quieter aspect of his artistic personality.

The broad expanse of meadow grass is rendered with short, horizontal strokes that convey the flatness of the terrain and the quality of summer light falling across it without shadows or dramatic incident. The composition's simplicity — flat green below, sky above — requires precise calibration of greens and blues to maintain pictorial interest.