The 1880s marked a turning point in Caillebotte's career. From 1882 onwards he was no longer involved with the Impressionist group, who continued exhibiting together in Paris and had become embroiled in heated internal politics. Caillebotte chose to retreat into his own world and his art. Yet it was the 1882 Impressionist exhibition—the last one Caillebotte took part in—which was dominated by landscapes, thus greatly influencing his subsequent work.

In addition to the portraits, interiors and depictions of urban Paris which populated the majority of his earlier oeuvre (see fig. 1), during this period the artist also painted views of the Normandy coast, holiday villas around Honfleur and Trouville, and above all, the quiet gardens of his home in the suburbs of Paris. As Marie Berhaut notes, these paintings were an “introduction to the second part of Caillebotte's oeuvre, which would be devoted almost exclusively to landscapes and seascapes” (Marie Berhaut, Caillebotte the Impressionist, New York, 1968, p. 10).

Erroneously recorded as Paysage en Normandie for years, recent scholarship rightfully situates the present composition outside the home of the artist in Petit Gennevilliers. A photograph by the artist’s brother Martial (see fig. 2) shows the artist's house with the same chimney-flanked roof (at right) that appears from a different angle at the far center of Jardin sauvage au Petit Gennevilliers. The two buildings in the photograph—the artist's studio at left and home at right—reappear over the years in numerous canvases by Caillebotte, always denoted by their characteristic salmon-hued roofs and often by one of their many gardens.

Like his friend Claude Monet, Caillebotte was an avid gardener and took great pride in the lush and vibrant habitats that surrounded his property. Alternately cultivated for flowers or vegetables, as seen in works like Le Jardin Potager, or left wild and billowing like the landscape in the present work, the gardens and the caretakers that populated the grounds of the estate at Petit Gennevilliers became a fixture in the artist’s paintings.

Jardin sauvage au Petit Gennevilliers evinces the joy and freedom of those years that Caillebotte, one of the few Impressionists who was financially independent, spent painting on his own. While some of Caillebotte’s landscapes from this location like Dahlias, Garden at Petit Gennevilliers from 1893 exhibit some human presence, earlier compositions like the present instead focus on the surrounding wilderness (see fig. 3). In the present work, the human figures are no longer present and the focus is placed instead on the contrast between nature’s elements and man-made constructions.

The painting’s vivid palette and the loose, animated brushwork which Caillebotte employs to depict the windy meadow in the foreground indeed recall some of Monet’s work executed at his own home, like The Artist's Garden at Vétheuil (see fig. 4). Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was the Impressionist landscapes by Monet, as well as those by Pissarro, Sisley and Renoir which dominated Caillebotte’s personal art collects ion, and which greatly inspired his own work.

Monet’s influence is discernible in other landscapes produced by Caillebotte during this period, such as La Plaine de Gennevilliers, champs jaunes from 1884 (see figs. 5 and 6). Inspired by his friend’s canvases on the same theme from the mid-1870s and 1880s, the painting forms part of a series—to which the present work belongs—depicting flat fields near the property first acquired by the artist and his brother in the early 1880s. However, despite evident similarities in palette and composition, in contrast to Monet, here Caillebotte is largely interested in agricultural innovation, echoing his earlier fascination with the marvels of urban engineering. The flat fields he chose to depict were, in fact, man-made, having had been transformed from floodplains.

Whether man-made or freely formed, Caillebotte’s landscapes from the 1880s are exceptional in their degree of artistic freedom and the technical prowess with which he explores the coloristic effects, leading them to be aptly described by art historians as among “the artist’s most successful achievements in the 1880s” (Rodolphe Rapetti in Exh. Cat. Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais; The Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gustave Caillebotte: The Unknown Impressionist, 1995, p. 265).