Brief Report
Caillebotte's painting Boats and Shed on the Banks of the Seine is notable for its luminosity and colourfulness. The law of optics whereby bright direct sunlight can lighten shadows by reflection or indeed give them colour was accorded particular importance here. As a result of the rays of sunshine falling vertically from above, the red and yellowishgreen hulls of the boats are reflected in the water with hardly any loss of colour, the contrast being reinforced still further by the direct use of complementary colours (fig. 9). The unmistakable reproduction of these physiological phenomena could point to the picture's having been painted in the open air with the artist paying close attention to natural light effects. The painting was executed on a standard F10 size commercially pre-primed canvas, the outlines of the motifs being first sketched in blue crayon (fig. 12). IR reflectography clearly reveals this underdrawing (fig. 6). In addition, in the sky there are visible lines which clearly derive from a first lay-in of the composition: if the picture is inverted, the strokes can be seen to represent the hulls of two boats, arranged in echelon, just like the boats in the visible riverscape. It would appear that the artist decided they were too big. Instead of removing these now irrelevant blue crayon lines, he simple inverted the canvas and started again. The partial red-brown underpainting in the sky is very unusual for Caillebotte, and could be connected; it may have served to cover over the rejected sketch lines. In other parts of the picture, we do not find this kind of underpainting. On the contrary, the painting suggests a brisk, largely wet-in-wet execution, which probably required no more than two or three sittings. The authenticity of the signature remains in doubt; it was applied in dilute dark-grey paint on a paint layer that was already dry and in places showing signs of craquelure (fig. 8). The inscription, now somewhat abraded, resembles neither Caillebotte's autograph signatures nor the posthumous signatures often later added by his brother Martial or his executor Auguste Renoir [Berhaut 1994, p. 50, cf. Caillebotte WRM Dep 622, WRM Dep. FC 689, WRM Dep. FC 727].
Gustave Caillebotte
Boats and Shed on the Bank of the Seine, 1891, oil on canvas, 46.0 x 55.0 cm, WRM Dep. FC 603
Gustave Caillebotte
born on 19 August 1848 in Paris,
died on 21 February 1894 in Gennevilliers
Further illustrations:
Fig. 02
Verso, lined
Fig. 03
Raking light
Fig. 04
Transmitted light
Fig. 05
UV fluorescence
Fig. 06
IR reflectogram reveals, in the sky region, turned through 180°, the first, rejected, compositional lay-in with the outlines of boats moored behind each other
Fig. 07
X-ray
Fig. 08
Details of the signature in incident light (bottom), in UV fluorescence (middle) and in microscopic photographs (M = 1 mm); the inscription is heavily abraded, partially varnished and runs across the aging cracks in places
Fig. 09
Detail of a boat with its coloured reflection in the water, showing the use of the complementary contrasts of the colourpairs yellow/violet and red/green
Fig. 10
Detail of the trees, brushwork is clearly visible: thin and well distributed in the sky, modelled and impasto in the foliage
Fig. 11
Wet-in-wet paint applications, microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)
Fig. 12
Blue underdrawing line in crayon, microscopic photograph (M = 1mm)
