Paintings I love
Gustave Caillebotte (French, 1848-1894)
Chemin montant
oil on canvas, 100.2 x 125.3 cm.
Painted in Trouville in 1881
Private collection
Executed in 1881, Chemin montant numbers among the undisputed masterpieces of Caillebotte’s career. Depicting a fashionable bourgeois couple strolling along a verdant country path, the picture represents a complex synthesis – at once bold and appealing – of two main components in Caillebotte’s oeuvre: his urban figure paintings from the 1870s and his landscapes and garden scenes from the following decade. The work is also a very rare example of a major Impressionist canvas to have disappeared from the public eye for more than a century.
The re-discovery of this important painting marked a critical event in the study of Caillebotte’s oeuvre and of the history of the Impressionist movement.
Caillebotte did not identify the location of this country scene, titling the composition simply Chemin montant. Although the artist purchased a house at Petit Gennevilliers in the spring of 1881, the brilliantly coloured villa at the left suggests the seaside resort of Trouville on the Normandy coast, where Caillebotte spent several weeks each summer between 1880 and 1884 in connection with his participation in local regattas. During this period, he painted an extraordinarily original group of landscapes that depict the opulent villas lining the coast between Villers and Villerville, including Villas au bord de la mer, en Normandie (1880) in which an identical house is featured. The two views show the same low garden wall and arched gateway, distinctive dentil mouldings, and triangular pediments above the windows, features which allow the house to be identified as the ‘Villa Italienne’ at Trouville, the architecture and landscaping of which remain largely unchanged to this day.
Source: Christies
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