Nature morte au vase de lilas

In 1881 Gustave Caillebotte moved from Paris to Petit-Gennevilliers, near Argenteuil. Here he was able to indulge in his favorite pastimes of painting and horticulture. In previous works the artist had depicted the garden as an extension of the bourgeois home. However, with the purchase of Petit-Gennevilliers, Caillebotte's interest in nature and still-lifes began to parallel his interest in gardening, allowing him to combine horticulture with his artistic and decorative interests. As Pierre Wittmer writes:

The garden at Petit-Gennevilliers became a horticultural laboratory and an artist's studio, where the experimental propagation of plants provided the subject matter for paintings which recorded the passage of the seasons through the cycle of their plants. In spring Caillebotte depicted clumps of hyacinths, a group of multicoloured pansies along the edge of a small lawn, as well as vases of cut flowers . . . In autumn, his attention turned to his dahlias, grown in the bed laid out to the south-west of the house, and chrysanthemums (P. Wittmer, Note on Caillebotte as an Horticulturalist", Gustave Caillebotte, The Unknown Impressionist, London, 1996, pp. 204-205).