Caillebotte’s Perissoires on the Yerres (1877) with three paddlers facing the viewer, similarly, contains three men paddling, but has a stronger sense of separation among the men than the last painting that lends to their camaraderie with the water. Again, there seems to be a sense of togetherness by the many boaters. They are going in the same direction up the river and appear to be coming from the same location. With a closer look, one finds that the men aren’t interacting at all. Each of them has their faces covered by their hats as if to seclude himself from his surroundings. The hat, by shutting the boater off from the rest of the world, shows his own concentration on the water and his closeness to it. The paddlers may be coming from the same place, but the distance between the boaters is so great that they seem completely cut off from one another. The last boater is almost like a dot on the horizon. Since the perissoires are viewed head on, this makes the perspective of the boats a bit odd, as if they aren’t all apart of the same scene, but are individual paintings put together. In the catalogue Gustave Caillebotte, Varnedoe comments on this: “Caillebotte should have been advised that, given the legs-flat posture of the paddlers and the long-lozenge form of these pointed craft, head-on views make for awkward perspective problems” (Varnedoe, 105). These ‘problems’ arise because Caillebotte tried to force a sense of camaraderie among the men by including many of them. Each boater seems as if he is in his own world, completely absorbed in his own paddling and the nature around him, rather than the people with whom he is paddling. The men appear to have taken on the water as the new friendship. Had Caillebotte created a less awkward painting with a side view of the boaters, it would have only included one of the men because of the substantial distance between them. The exception to this would be that on the right there is a stern and a paddle of what seems to be a fourth boater paddling right next to the man in the foreground of the painting. However, Caillebotte severs with his frame of reference the only possible sense of friendship or togetherness that would have been shown by two men paddling right next to one another. Given the opportunity, Caillebotte still avoided the prospect of closeness among the perissoires and in his own life. Figuratively, Caillebotte seems to have put the same distance he put between the boaters in Perissoires on the Yerres between him and the people in his life.
Perissoires on the Yerres. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. 1877.