Paris Street; Rainy Day

Paris Street; Rainy Day, oil-on-canvas painting (1877) by French artist Gustave Caillebotte depicting contemporary Parisians holding umbrellas as they crisscross the city just as a rain shower seems to have subsided. Considered the artist’s masterpiece, Paris Street; Rainy Day merges the modern subjects Caillebotte absorbed from the Impressionists and the careful drawing and modeling he learned from the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Caillebotte thus provides a unique view of Paris as it was transforming from an ancient city into a modern metropolis.

Caillebotte’s association with the Impressionists

Caillebotte’s canvas was shown at the third Impressionist exhibition, held in Paris in 1877. He had met Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet, members of the Impressionists, in 1874 and had first shown with them in the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876. Caillebotte later became the chief organizer, promoter, and, after inheriting a portion of his father’s wealth, financial backer of the Impressionist exhibitions for the next six years. He also used his money to support and purchase works by other Impressionists, and, upon his death in 1894, his collection went to the French people and later formed the basis of the collection of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

The Impressionist movement built on Realist traditions from the early 19th century, especially in regard to their subjects. Like Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, the latter of whom was friendly with the Impressionists, they rejected the historical, religious, and mythological subjects of the academy, the École des Beaux-Arts. Instead the Impressionists painted members of the middle class doing ordinary activities in contemporary urban or suburban surroundings. Although Caillebotte had studied at the academy, soon after meeting the Impressionists, he too began to paint modern life.

Haussmann’s Paris

Paris Street; Rainy Day depicts an intersection in contemporary Paris. Caillebotte rendered the urban space without any distinguishing characteristics, such as a shop sign, monument, newspaper kiosk, or park, so as to represent any Parisian street. Scholars, however, have identified it as the complex six-point intersection now known as the Place de Dublin. It is located in a neighborhood, near the Saint-Lazare train station, where Caillebotte and his family had settled a decade earlier. He witnessed the district completely transformed as part of the decades-long reconstruction (1853–70) of Paris under the urban planner Georges-Eugène, Baron Haussmann. The city planner cut wide, straight, tree-lined avenues through the chaotic mass of small streets of which Paris was then composed, connecting the train terminals and making rapid and easy movement across the city possible for the first time. Haussmann also increased the number of streetlights and sidewalks, created new systems of water supply and drainage, opened up parks in the English mode, and constructed the white limestone buildings with black slate roofs that still define the French capital in the 21st century.

An Impressionist subject

In Paris Street, Caillebotte carefully replicates Haussmann’s Paris and its inhabitants. Figures are caught mid-stride as they traverse the neighborhood of towering limestone buildings and rain-slicked cobblestone streets. An elegant couple on the right, walking toward the foreground, dominates the painting. They are meticulously painted, from the man’s smoothly rendered umbrella—an item that had recently become widely available—to the woman’s gleaming earring. Both wear the latest fashions: the man sports a suit, a black overcoat, and a top hat, and the young woman wears a veiled hat and a dark fur-lined coat. The monumentality of the painting, at nearly 7 feet by 9 feet (2 meters by 2.74 meters), causes the two figures to appear almost life-size, making the viewer feel like a pedestrian in the scene. The couple, however, looks out toward the street, averting their gaze from the viewer and the figure approaching from the right, whose umbrella seems about to collide with theirs.

The figures in the background wear similar dark attire to those in the foreground. The male figures all seem to sport the same type of black top hats, overcoats, and mustaches, while the women are all dressed in dark gowns. Many of them carry similar gray umbrellas. One miniscule figure—whose face is obscured by a woman’s umbrella but who stands out from the crowd in his white attire—steps toward the sidewalk beyond the left shoulder of the gentleman in the foreground. He carries a ladder, suggesting that he is some kind of worker, perhaps a painter. Toward the center of the painting, in the distance, the viewer can just make out scaffolding next to one of the buildings. Both the painter and the scaffolding speak to the transitional moment, suggesting that the new urban space is just being completed.

Academic style

Although the subject of Paris Street; Rainy Day is Impressionist, its execution deviates from the formal conventions of the movement. The Impressionists are known for rejecting the lessons of the academy and instead using thick brushstrokes, areas of flat color, and shallow perspectival depth. Caillebotte, on the other hand, meticulously modeling his figures to give them form and using perspective to create the appearance of space.

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The intersection that Paris Street; Rainy Day depicts is complex and asymmetric, but, rather than portraying the confusion of the space as Renoir does in his painting The Umbrellas (c. 1881–86), Caillebotte organizes the scene by using linear perspective. Perhaps the most mathematical means of creating the illusion of depth on a flat surface, the technique uses parallel lines (orthogonals) that converge toward a vanishing point on the composition’s horizon line. While Caillebotte, who early on trained as an engineer, complicated the system by using multiple vanishing points in his painting, the space is still legible as a radial intersection. In addition to using orthogonal lines, linear perspective also renders figures and objects in the composition increasingly smaller as they near the vanishing point so as to appear farther from the viewer. Thus, Caillebotte’s protruding buildings gradually taper, and the figures that punctuate the street diminish in scale as the space recedes.

Caillebotte continues to assert order by using straight, controlled lines to depict the backdrop of the city. One of Haussmann’s new lamps dissects the painting vertically, and it is made up of precise angles. Meanwhile, the city’s new uniformity is emphasized through pattern. The buildings have facades of evenly spaced windows, balconies, and chimneys, creating a kind of rhythm. This repetition is carried onto the figures, who, as noted above, all dress similarly and use the same type of umbrella.

History

During the third Impressionist exhibition, one reviewer described Caillebotte as “an Impressionist in name only. He knows how to draw and [he] paints more seriously than his friends.” Soon after, Caillebotte moved away from the precision of Paris Street; Rainy Day and increasingly adopted the thick brushstrokes and brighter palettes of the Impressionists, though his works never again achieved the same originality of that masterpiece. Paris Street; Rainy Day was not shown again until 1894, during a retrospective held in Paris soon after the artist’s sudden death. It remained in Caillebotte’s family until the mid-20th century, when it was sold to an heir of the Chrysler Corporation. It was acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1964, just as renewed interest in the artist was growing. Since that time, the painting has become one of the most prized gems in the museum’s collection.