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Lot Essay
Although he lamented that it was impossible to ‘paint and sail’, during the summers of the 1880s, it seemed that Gustave Caillebotte was able, indeed, to do both (G. Caillebotte, Letter to C. Monet, n. d., reprinted in M. Marrinan, Gustave Caillebotte: Painting The Paris of Naturalism, 1872-1887, Los Angeles, 2016, p. 323). Like many other well-heeled Parisians, he made the annual pilgrimage to Normandy to take in the sun, surf, and joie-de-vivre. The French coast along the English Channel had become a fashionable place to holiday after receiving approval from Emperor Napoléon III and Empress Eugénie, and once small fishing villages had been transformed into glamorous seaside resorts frequented by the wealthy and cosmopolitan. By the time Caillebotte painted Trouville, la plage et les villas, the present work, in 1882, Normandy was the de facto destination for prosperous Parisians, the place to see and be seen.
Concerted efforts by the Cercle de la voile de Paris and the Trouville-Deauville sailing club made Trouville the centre of summer regattas on the Channel coast – and thus where Caillebotte, an avid yachtsman, decided to call home for the summertime months. Following the spring season in Argenteuil, he would have his boats towed to the Channel for the upcoming regattas. When not racing, he roamed the steep cliffs and meandering paths that surrounded the small town, capturing the picturesque views in paint. These were quiet, almost pastoral works. Despite the summer pageantry that dominated these seaside towns – a favoured subject by artists including Eugène Boudin and Claude Monet – Caillebotte included very few figures in his canvases.
Instead, the artist invoked society’s presence in his depiction of the newly constructed villas that belonged to the summer visitors. Trouville, la plage et les villas is set just to the east of the famed Hȏtel des Roches Noires and depicts the rooftops of the Villas Courval, Persane, and Amélie. In the centre one can see the Villa Malakoff, easily identifiable by its crenelated tower. A small strip of the Route de la Corniche is visible along the bottom edge of the painting. Although always experimental when it came to framing devices, the vertiginous perspective of his Trouville, la plage et les villas owes as much to where Caillebotte himself was staying as to any of his own pictorial innovations.
For his first summer in Trouville, Caillebotte and his brother Martial rented Villa Italienne near the intersection of the avenue Marcel Proust and the avenue des Chalets. The house and its gardens featured in several paintings including Villas au bord de la mer en Normandie (Berhaut, no. 164; private collection). The following summer, the Caillebotte brothers moved next door to the Chalet des Fleurs where they stayed between 1882 and 1885. Both were located in the flats above the quartier Bellevue, Trouville’s bustling hub, and it seems Caillebotte’s rooftop perspective was one he found directly outside his bedroom window. Throughout his many summers in the town, he remained faithful to this site and painted several views from this plateau.
The months that Caillebotte spent in Normandy were extraordinarily productive, and he created at least fifty paintings of Trouville, Honfleur, and their environs. These canvases mark a shift in direction during which he largely abandoned the scenes of contemporary urban life that had thus far characterised his practice. Eschewing the crisply finished forms of his cityscapes, he began to favour looser brushwork; in Trouville, la plage et les villas, the long marks were applied wet-in-wet, a technique especially noticeable in the pale turquoise water of the Channel. But even as the subject matter differed, Caillebotte retained the plunging perspectives and astonishing viewpoints that he had begun to explore ten years prior. Instead of painting Trouville from the beach, for the present work, he positioned himself high above the coastal town to gaze downward upon its topography. Rather than proceeding into the scene, the viewer remains on the periphery of the present work, gazing down upon the slate roofs and seafoam blue. Such detachment echoes the artist’s celebrated paintings of Paris in which he painted the city from unconventional angles seen for instance, in Toits sous la neige (Berhaut, no. 96), held in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay.
It was during this period that the ‘confrontation’ between ‘colour, light, and optical phenomena’ came to the fore in Caillebotte’s practice (K. Sagner, ‘The Exploration of Painting’, in K. Sanger and M. Hollein, eds., Gustave Caillebotte: An Impressionist and Photography, exh. cat., Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2012, p. 196). Similar daring innovation can be seen in the present work, in the way that depth is defined chromatically; the sharp diagonal perspective; and the amount of space given over to the quasi-abstracted waves. Indeed, the villa paintings propose a continuation of Caillebotte’s unsettling vision of modern life, here extended to summer’s leisure, and making them, as Rodolphe Rapetti argues ‘the most original works’ that the artist created during his trips to Normandy (R. Rapetti, Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist, exh. cat., Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 1994, p. 257).
Concerted efforts by the Cercle de la voile de Paris and the Trouville-Deauville sailing club made Trouville the centre of summer regattas on the Channel coast – and thus where Caillebotte, an avid yachtsman, decided to call home for the summertime months. Following the spring season in Argenteuil, he would have his boats towed to the Channel for the upcoming regattas. When not racing, he roamed the steep cliffs and meandering paths that surrounded the small town, capturing the picturesque views in paint. These were quiet, almost pastoral works. Despite the summer pageantry that dominated these seaside towns – a favoured subject by artists including Eugène Boudin and Claude Monet – Caillebotte included very few figures in his canvases.
Instead, the artist invoked society’s presence in his depiction of the newly constructed villas that belonged to the summer visitors. Trouville, la plage et les villas is set just to the east of the famed Hȏtel des Roches Noires and depicts the rooftops of the Villas Courval, Persane, and Amélie. In the centre one can see the Villa Malakoff, easily identifiable by its crenelated tower. A small strip of the Route de la Corniche is visible along the bottom edge of the painting. Although always experimental when it came to framing devices, the vertiginous perspective of his Trouville, la plage et les villas owes as much to where Caillebotte himself was staying as to any of his own pictorial innovations.
For his first summer in Trouville, Caillebotte and his brother Martial rented Villa Italienne near the intersection of the avenue Marcel Proust and the avenue des Chalets. The house and its gardens featured in several paintings including Villas au bord de la mer en Normandie (Berhaut, no. 164; private collection). The following summer, the Caillebotte brothers moved next door to the Chalet des Fleurs where they stayed between 1882 and 1885. Both were located in the flats above the quartier Bellevue, Trouville’s bustling hub, and it seems Caillebotte’s rooftop perspective was one he found directly outside his bedroom window. Throughout his many summers in the town, he remained faithful to this site and painted several views from this plateau.
The months that Caillebotte spent in Normandy were extraordinarily productive, and he created at least fifty paintings of Trouville, Honfleur, and their environs. These canvases mark a shift in direction during which he largely abandoned the scenes of contemporary urban life that had thus far characterised his practice. Eschewing the crisply finished forms of his cityscapes, he began to favour looser brushwork; in Trouville, la plage et les villas, the long marks were applied wet-in-wet, a technique especially noticeable in the pale turquoise water of the Channel. But even as the subject matter differed, Caillebotte retained the plunging perspectives and astonishing viewpoints that he had begun to explore ten years prior. Instead of painting Trouville from the beach, for the present work, he positioned himself high above the coastal town to gaze downward upon its topography. Rather than proceeding into the scene, the viewer remains on the periphery of the present work, gazing down upon the slate roofs and seafoam blue. Such detachment echoes the artist’s celebrated paintings of Paris in which he painted the city from unconventional angles seen for instance, in Toits sous la neige (Berhaut, no. 96), held in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay.
It was during this period that the ‘confrontation’ between ‘colour, light, and optical phenomena’ came to the fore in Caillebotte’s practice (K. Sagner, ‘The Exploration of Painting’, in K. Sanger and M. Hollein, eds., Gustave Caillebotte: An Impressionist and Photography, exh. cat., Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2012, p. 196). Similar daring innovation can be seen in the present work, in the way that depth is defined chromatically; the sharp diagonal perspective; and the amount of space given over to the quasi-abstracted waves. Indeed, the villa paintings propose a continuation of Caillebotte’s unsettling vision of modern life, here extended to summer’s leisure, and making them, as Rodolphe Rapetti argues ‘the most original works’ that the artist created during his trips to Normandy (R. Rapetti, Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist, exh. cat., Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 1994, p. 257).