Gustave Caillebotte

Jean-Baptiste & Adèle Daurelle, Paris
Private Collection, Paris (acquired from the above in the 1990s)

Brunoy, Musée de Brunoy, Autour de Caillebotte… dans la vallée de l’Yerres: orangers, orangeries, oranges…, 1994-95, illustrated on the cover of the catalogue
Paris, Galerie Brame & Lorenceau, Gustave Caillebotte 1848-1894, Dessins, pastels, peintures, 1998, no. 8
Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle, Caillebotte, An Impressionist and Photography, 2012-13, no. 147

The canvas is not lined. The surface is richly textured and the colors are fresh and vibrant. Under UV light: several thin strokes of inpainting are visible particularly in the sky to the outer perimeter at top right and to the ground toward bottom left corner. This work is in good condition.
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Yerres. De l’Exèdre, le porche de la demeure familiale is one of the canvases Caillebotte painted depicting his family summer home in the small town of Yerres, situated on a tributary of the Seine not far from Paris. Caillebotte's family acquired the early-nineteenth-century chateau when the artist was twelve years old and from then until his parents' deaths he and his brothers spent their summers there boating, hunting and playing billiards.

Pierre Wittmer writes of the significance which Yerres held for Caillebotte, "The Yerres river—thanks to its location and scenic attraction—...was as important to Gustave Caillebotte as the Epte was to Claude Monet or Mont Saint-Victoire was to Paul Cézanne. The artist adapts the reality of his world to his needs. Gustave Caillebotte gave the sites in which he lived a new and original and wholly personal dimension. His rendering of rural life evokes its perennial and cyclic nature, always leaving us with a sense of the rhythm of passing days and seasons" (Pierre Wittmer, Caillebotte and His Garden at Yerres, New York, 1991, p. 28).