Villas at Trouville

Painted in 1884, this view of the seaside resort at Trouville shows Caillebotte applying the cool, carefully structured realism of his earlier Paris street scenes to the Normandy coast. Caillebotte, a trained engineer who funded much of the Impressionist enterprise, brought a distinctive precision to the group’s subjects, and the crisp architecture of the resort villas suits his temperament far better than the looser handling of his colleagues. It is a relatively rare excursion by him into the fashionable beach towns.