Iris bleus, jardin du Petit Gennevilliers

Painted in 1892, a year before Caillebotte's death, this iris garden scene at Petit Gennevilliers is among his most luminous late works. Blue irises were a favorite subject — their upright, architectural form appealed to his structural sensibility as much as their intense violet-blue color. The Petit Gennevilliers garden that he cultivated obsessively in his final decade becomes in this canvas a place of almost jewel-like color intensity. The Art Gallery of Ontario canvas represents the mature flower-painting practice that would influence twentieth-century garden painting. Caillebotte's iris paintings anticipate Monet's own later immersion in the forms and colors of the garden.

The blue-violet irises blaze against darker foliage with confident, assertive strokes. Caillebotte renders each bloom with structural specificity — the characteristic bearded petals, the upright spathes — within a composition organized by the vertical rhythm of multiple plants.