Paris Street Rainy Day

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Paris Street Rainy Day: Gustave Caillebotte

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Gustave Caillebotte Oil Painting - Paris Street Rainy Day

Keywords: Paris, Street, Rainy, Day

Work Overview: Paris Street; Rainy Day
Gustave Caillebotte
1877
Oil on canvas
83 1/2 x 108 3/4in. (212.2 x 276.2 cm)
Inscribed at lower left: G. Caillebotte. 1877
Art Institute of Chicago

Paris Street; Rainy Day (French Rue de Paris, temps de pluie) is a large 1877 oil painting by the French artist Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894), and is his best known work.[1] It shows a number of individuals walking through the Place de Dublin, in 1877 known as the Carrefour de Moscou, at an intersection to the east of the Gare Saint-Lazare in north Paris. Although Caillebotte was a friend and patron of many of the impressionist painters, and this work is part of that school, it differs in its realism and reliance on line rather than broad brush strokes.

Caillebotte's interest in photography is evident. The figures in the foreground appear "out of focus", those in the mid-distance (the carriage and the pedestrians in the intersection) have sharp edges, while the features in the background become progressively indistinct. The severe cropping of some figures – particularly the man to the far right – further suggests the influence.

The first showing of the painting was at the Third Impressionist Exhibition of 1877. It currently is owned by the Art Institute of Chicago.[2] AIC curator Gloria Groom described the work as "the great picture of urban life in the late 19th century."

The tone of the light indicates that the painting is set on a wintery afternoon,[4] and the two main figures walk underneath an umbrella. They are dressed in the height of contemporary Parisian fashion. She wears a hat, veil, diamond earring, demure brown dress, and a fur lined coat, described in 1877 as "modern – or should I say, the latest fashion". The man wears a moustache, topcoat, frock coat,[5] top hat, bow tie, starched white shirt, buttoned waistcoat and an open long coat with collar turned up. They are unambiguously middle class, yet some working class figures may be seen in the background; a maid in a doorway, the decorator carrying a ladder, cut-off by the umbrella above him.[6][7] Caillebotte juxtaposes the figures and the perspective in a playful manner, with one man appearing to jump from the wheel of a carriage; another pair of legs appear below the rim of an umbrella.

The painting does not present a convivial mood. The figures seem mostly isolated, and their expressions are largely downcast. They appear to hurry rather than stroll through the streets, absorbed in their own thoughts. The umbrellas shield them, in the words of Rose-Marie Hagen, "not just from the rain, but, also it seems, from other passers by".[6] Characteristic of the positioning of the figures, the heads and eyes of the main couple are faced away from the man approaching them from their right. Hagen believes that given their close quarters, they will both be unable to comfortably step out of the man's way, but also their averted gaze applies equally to the viewer, who looks from a perspective equal to us.[8] Caillebotte reproduces the effect of a camera lens in that the points at the center of the image seem to bulge. He also recreates the focusing effect of the camera in the way that it sharpens certain subjects of an image, but not others. The same purpose is seen in the overall clarity of the image. The foreground is in focus, but slightly smudged; the middle ground has sharp, clear edges and well defined subjects, and the background fades into the distance, becoming more and more blurry the farther back the eye travels. He makes the middle ground section more clear, mimicking the effect of a camera.

The figures appear to have walked into the painting, as though Caillebotte was taking a snapshot of people going about their day; in fact, he spent months carefully placing them within the pictorial space.[6] The painting is highly linear;[9] its focus draws the viewer's eye to the vantage point at the center of the buildings in the background. The strong vertical of the central green lamp post divides the painting; a horizontal alignment breaks the painting into quarters; the gaslight at the center of the picture throws shadows on the wet cobblestones, and divides the composition in two. Cobblestones dominate one full quarter of the canvas.

Paris Street; Rainy Day gives a view from the eastern side of the Rue de Turin, looking north toward the Place de Dublin. The neoclassical buildings reflect the construction works of Baron Haussmann. The view shown is spacious, and details a broad view of a number of streets. Although the ashlar facades of the buildings might today seem uniform, at the time they would have been modern and fresh – in Caillebotte's youth the area was a hill just beyond the city edge just beginning to be developed as a residential center for the bourgeoisie.[8]

Three roads are visible on the northern side of the square: the rue de Moscou (left), the rue Clapeyron (center), and a continuation of the rue de Turin (right), which runs from the foreground and into the background. The square is crossed by the rue de Saint-Pétersbourg, suggested by the line of the buildings to the left and a break in the buildings to the right.[8] The point of view of the roads and the buildings portrayed allows Caillebotte to use two-point perspective.

Émile Zola, indeed a critic of Caillebotte, in 1877 praised this work in an article "Notes parisiennes: Une exposition: les peintres impressionnistes" published in Le Sémaphore de Marseille.

As with nearly all of Caillebotte's paintings, it remained in the family until the mid twentieth century. It was acquired by Walter P. Chrysler Jr. in 1955, who in turn sold it to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1964.

This work is featured in the online catalogue Caillebotte Paintings and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago. This is the museum’s third volume in its scholarly digital series on the Impressionist circle. This catalogue offers in-depth curatorial and technical entries on the five works of art by Gustave Caillebotte in the museum’s collection. The entries feature interactive and layered high-resolution imaging, videos, and previously unpublished technical photographs in addition to archival materials and documentation relating to each artwork.
In his masterpiece, Paris Street; Rainy Day, Gustave Caillebotte brought an unusual monumentality and compositional control to a typical Impressionist subject, the new boulevards that were changing the Paris cityscape. The result is at once real and contrived, casual and choreographed. With its curiously detached figures, the canvas depicts the anonymity that the boulevards seemed to create. By the time it appeared in the third Impressionist exhibition, held in April 1877, the artist was 29 years old, a man of considerable wealth, and not only the youngest but also the most active member of the Impressionist group. He contributed six of his own canvases to the exhibition; played a leading part in its funding, organization, promotion, and installation; and lent a number of paintings by his colleagues that he owned.

Beginning in 1851, the government of Napoleon III transformed the old streets of Paris into a new system of grand boulevards. This painting abounds with evidence of the city’s rebuilding. Gustave Caillebotte selected a complex intersection near the Saint-Lazare train station for his subject, distorting the size of the buildings and the distance between them to create a wide-angle view that reflects the sweeping modernity of this capital city.
The artist’s family owned property in the busy neighborhood depicted here, which was populated by wealthy Parisians and workers of various sorts. In the foreground, a man and woman wearing fashionable clothes stroll down the sidewalk. Behind them stand the uniformly designed buildings that were added to Paris during the renovations overseen by French administrator Baron Haussmann.
The highly crafted surface, monumental size, geometric order, and elaborate perspective of Paris Street; Rainy Day (the artist used a gaslight to separate the foreground from the middle and distant views) are more academic than Impressionist in character. Caillebotte clearly intended these elements to underscore the power of painting to capture the momentary quality of everyday life. In this cropped composition, it is easy to imagine that in just a moment, everyone in the painting will have moved and nothing will be the same.

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However, when it was painted in 1877, it constituted a bold look at a swiftly modernizing city. The fashionably dressed Parisian couple in the foreground of the painting strolls down a street near the Saint-Lazare train station. In preceding decades, the railroad’s expansion had prompted a radical transformation of the neighborhood, as had urban initiatives led by city administrator Baron Haussmann in the 1850s and ’60s. The broad boulevard and grand, uniform buildings that set the scene for Caillebotte’s figures are evidence of the so-called “Haussmannization” of Paris.
Caillebotte brings vitality to his city scene through the careful manipulation of angles, cropping of figures, and placement of objects. The viewer’s vantage point is from the sidewalk, facing the couple at right. Parallel to the picture plane and cut off at the knees, the pair appears close to the viewer and moving closer. One can easily imagine that in moments, they will step straight through the picture plane and continue on their way. The viewer’s eye, however, does not stop with these figures. Rather, it bounces around the canvas, following the asymmetric rhythm of the umbrellas Caillebotte has scattered throughout the scene.
The geometric order, monumental figures, and dramatic perspective employed by Caillebotte seem to offer a vision quite different from the images most often associated with Impressionism—Monet’s light-dappled haystacks, indistinct landscapes, and nearly abstract lily ponds. What links Caillebotte to the Impressionist artists with whom he exhibited—Monet, Renoir, Degas, Morisot, and others—is not his style so much as his desire to capture momentary experience and fleeting vision in works that explore themes of class, identity, urbanity, and modernity.

Here are two things you can dependably say about life in Paris: the sky is usually grey and the fashion is always for black. It’s true today and it was true in 1877, when Gustave Caillebotte depicted the Parisian bourgeoisie sweeping down the streets under a steady, stubborn shower. Just look at them: the couple in the foreground, she with her fur-flecked coat and pearl earrings, he with his moustache framing a permanent moue. The gent to the right of them, tilting his umbrella as he passes; he doesn’t look at the couple, they don’t look at him. A man in the middle ground crosses the street, gazing downward; in the distance, someone without an umbrella darts from one corner to the other.

And behind them, fronting the infinite boulevards, are the French capital’s unmistakable cut-stone apartment buildings: commerce on the ground floor, balcony on the second, little chambres de bonnes up top. We’re in the Place de Dublin, as it’s now called, in the eighth arrondissement, hard by the Gare Saint-Lazare. Now the neighbourhood is a bit tatty, but when Caillebotte was painting, it was a brand-new residential district. The slicked cobblestones have now given way to asphalt; the carriage on the left has been succeeded by the car and the bikes of the Vélib’ cycle scheme. But this is still the Paris we know – the modern city, so lonely, so beautiful.
This is still the Paris we know – the modern city, so lonely, so beautiful.
For 50 years, Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day has been in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, but it has traveled to Washington DC for a major exhibition of a slightly overshadowed innovator of 19th-Century French painting. Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye, which opens on 28 June at the National Gallery of Art, brings together 50 paintings, and although the show will feature hisself-portraits and lesser-known still lifes, his most enduring images are of Paris in transition. (The show continues to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth in November.)
Caillebotte, not exactly an Impressionist, nevertheless shared his contemporaries’ obsession with painting modern life. That obsession was made manifest not through any great experiment in pictorial style, but via a cool and insistent gaze on the streets, the bridges, and the anonymous passersby in the capital of the 19th Century. He may not have been as daring or as influential as his friends Manet and Monet, Pissarro and Cézanne. But the scenes he depicted – of a Paris in radical transition, as the City of Light morphed from a roiling warren of disorganized streets into a orderly, pacified network of grand boulevards – offer an unrivaled view of a city tumbling into modernity.

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