Les Périssoires
Gustave Caillebotte·1878
Historical Context
Les Périssoires (The Canoes) at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes, painted in 1878, is one of several paintings Caillebotte devoted to rowing and canoeing on the Yerres river at his family estate. The flat-bottomed périssoire, a type of canoe popular in France for leisure paddling on calm rivers, gave him a subject that combined his genuine passion for water sports with an opportunity to explore the challenging formal problems of representing figures in small boats on water. The steeply angled view he employs here creates the spatial disorientation characteristic of his most adventurous compositions.
Technical Analysis
Caillebotte places the canoes and their paddlers high in the composition, with the river surface occupying most of the picture plane. The water's reflections of sky and bank are rendered with horizontal strokes of varying color that suggest movement without literal description.
