About this work
Three small flat-bottomed canoes cut diagonally across the canvas of *Skiffs* (1877), each occupied by a single paddler navigating the quiet waters of the Yerres River. The boats are arranged in a staggered line along the broad river, its banks densely wooded on both sides.
The bows of each skiff make patterned ripples in the water, where bright ochre paddles and the rowers' white tops appear as broken reflections.
Caillebotte adopted a dramatic viewpoint perched high above the scene — the elevated angle collapsing depth so that the boats appear to cascade toward the viewer, their diagonal procession generating a restless, almost cinematic energy. The palette is cool and sun-dappled: deep wooded greens frame the canvas while the blue-grey water fractures into streaks of ochre and white wherever a paddle blade dips and lifts.
Between 1877 and 1878, Caillebotte made a series of paintings focusing on swimmers, fishermen, rowers, and canoers at his family estate in Yerres — a rare period of pastoral retreat for a painter otherwise associated with the stone and steel of Paris. *Skiffs* is one of the earliest and largest of his boating scenes.
Exhibited at the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1879 under the name *Périssoires sur l'Yerres*, it adopted the short, broken brushstrokes of Monet and the bold palette of Renoir, but achieved a much different effect — the rowers' zig-zagging rhythm conveying a sense of movement and a progression of time and space that reveals Caillebotte's interest in photography. The influence of Japanese ukiyo-e printmaking is palpable too: the tilted plane, the cropped composition, the refusal of a conventional horizon.
This is a painting that rewards a long wall and natural light — a reading room, a study, or a hallway where afternoon sun can pick out the ochre and white accents in the water. It speaks to anyone drawn to the pleasure of leisure held in precise, almost structural tension: the scene is relaxed in subject, but rigorously composed. The overall mood is one of suspended motion — a summer afternoon caught between one paddle stroke and the next.
