Paris Street; Rainy Day
Gustave Caillebotte (1848 to 1894) · 1877
A well dressed couple walks toward you under a single umbrella across a wide, wet intersection in the new Paris of Baron Haussmann. Behind them the tall apartment buildings fan out along the boulevards, a green lamp post divides the picture almost exactly in half, and other figures hurry past with their own umbrellas. The place is the Place de Dublin near the Gare Saint Lazare, and Caillebotte, who lived nearby, has caught the exact grey light of a Parisian shower, when the cobbles turn to mirrors and the sky flattens to pearl.
Caillebotte exhibited with the Impressionists but painted like no one else in the group. The surface is smooth and the drawing precise, closer to photography than to Monet's broken brushwork. Look at the way the cobblestones are painted one by one, each catching a slice of reflected light, and at the deliberate cropping of the man on the right, cut in half by the frame as if by a camera. The perspective is drawn with a wide angle that makes the buildings lean away and the foreground figures loom large, so you feel you are about to bump into the couple with their umbrella.
The painting was the centrepiece of the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877 and then stayed in the artist's family for decades; the Art Institute bought it in 1964. Caillebotte was wealthy, and it was his bequest of paintings by his friends that founded the French state's Impressionist collection. Here he turned his eye on the rebuilt city itself, its wide streets and anonymous crowds, with a mixture of admiration and coolness. A memorable detail is the tiny figure of a man crossing far in the distance under the lamp post, painted with two or three strokes and yet perfectly balanced on the wet stones.
Did You Know? Caillebotte was a keen sailor and yacht designer, and the way the umbrellas tilt against the wind shows a sailor's eye for weather.
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