The Yellow Fields at Gennevilliers

The Yellow Fields at Gennevilliers belongs to Caillebotte's late rural series painted around his Petit-Gennevilliers property, where the flat Seine valley offered expansive open agricultural landscapes quite different from the enclosed urban spaces of his early career. By the late 1880s he was producing these landscapes with a freer, more instinctively Impressionist touch, having spent years as both practitioner and patron — his collection of Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Degas was forming the nucleus of what would become the Musée d'Orsay's core Impressionist holdings.

A high horizon line gives maximum space to the yellow-gold field, painted in short horizontal and diagonal strokes. The sky above is rendered in varied blues with broken white clouds. Warm yellows below and cool blues above create the luminous rural atmosphere of his Gennevilliers landscapes.