Yerres

Yerres is where Impressionism learned to row. From 1860 the Caillebotte family kept a summer estate on the little river that gives the town its name, and the young Gustave Caillebotte painted some eighty canvases in its park and on its water: the skiffs and périssoires gliding under the banks, bathers, the kitchen garden, the orange trees — the sun-struck domestic republic that made him, alongside his Paris pavements, one of the movement's essential eyes. The estate survives almost intact: the Maison Caillebotte, with its park, ornamental farm, chapel and exotic "Swiss cottage", has been restored and opened to visitors, so that one can stand today precisely where the pictures happened — a rare case of an Impressionist motif preserved whole, twenty minutes from Paris.

The town around the park is Essonne at its most residential: the valley of the Yerres winding green through the suburbs, a medieval priory tower and old mills recalling the working river, and the easy rhythm of a commune that has kept its trees. Its public stage is the Théâtre de Yerres, part of the town's cultural centre, whose seasons of concerts, theatre and variety draw names from well beyond the valley — the venue documented in the concert record. A painter's garden, a rowing river, and a working stage: Yerres offers the pleasant suspicion that the nineteenth century's Sunday afternoons never entirely ended here.