At first glance, Perissoires on the Yerres (1877) with three boaters, the first of Caillebotte’s series of perissoire paintings, gives off a sense of camaraderie and friendship. The men are paddling together, as if going to some destination up the river. These boaters seem like they would be friends spending time together enjoying a common interest. According to Wittmer in Caillebotte an his Garden at Yerres the river was a main part of the social scene at Yerres (Wittmer, 166). Despite the façade of community and friendship shown by the presence of multiple paddlers in this painting, none of the paddlers are actually looking at or interacting with one another. Each of the three men is completely focused on their own paddling. They are completely absorbed in their own actions and interaction with the water. The paddlers seem to have substituted human companionship with that of the water around them. For this reason each man is completely oblivious to the other boaters around him. The man on the far left is looking straight down the river and seems to have no concern for the other men and leaving them behind. The paddler in the middle is pointed in a slightly different direction and faces more toward the right than the other men. The last paddler, as Isaacson says in The Crisis of Impressionism, is “easily ignored… [and] is just as easily absorbed into the broad surface pattern of the whole” (Isaacson, 71). By giving the paddlers a sense of oneness with the water Caillebotte is showing how they are replacing the other paddlers with the companionship of the water. This man also has his hat covering his head and is therefore not paying any attention to the other men. These men seem to be so disconnected from each other because of their focus on boating that they could stand alone as separate paintings. Michael Fried in his essay “Caillebotte’s Impressionism” writes about absorption as a recurring theme in Caillebotte’s paintings: “In fact Caillebotte favored particularly intense and, where possible, bodily versions of such subjects…which comes across as an evocation not just of absorption in [the action] but also of the bodily condition of nearsightedness” (Fried, 83). This ‘absorption’ that the boaters have into the surroundings and their own paddling completely isolates them from one another. Caillebotte seems to use the plurality of the perissoires to mask the isolation of the three boaters.
Perissoires on the Yerres. Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI. 1877.