Paris Street: Rainy Day - Gustave Caillebotte(1877, Art Institute of Chicago)
Paris Street; Rainy Day (also known as Paris: A Rainy Day) is an 1877 oil painting by the French artist Gustave Caillebotte. The piece depicts an intersection near the Gare Saint-Lazare, a railroad station in north Paris. One of Caillebotte's best known works, it debuted at the Third Impressionist Exhibition of 1877 and is currently on display at the Art Institute of Chicago. Art Institute curator Gloria Groom described the piece as "the great picture of urban life in the late 19th century.
Considered the masterpiece of his career, Paris Street; Rainy Day displays the hallmarks of Gustave Caillebotte’s mature style: a modern urban subject, realistically depicted; a peculiar and insistent spatial order; and a sense of time momentarily frozen.
In Paris Street; Rainy Day, life-sized figures walk toward us on the sidewalk of the rue de Turin just before it crosses the rue de Moscou. This complex intersection, part of the new city plan of Paris designed by Baron Georges Haussmann, was located just minutes from the Saint-Lazare train station and the cast-iron Place de l’Europe, from which one could view the trains rushing back and forth from the countryside. Caillebotte himself owned property in this neighborhood, and Edouard Manet’s studio was less than a five-minute walk from this intersection. The upraised umbrellas, watery reflections on the pavement, and gray tones of this very large-scale painting all show Caillebotte’s interest, shared with other Impressionist artists, in capturing on canvas the atmosphere and light of a specific moment. But unlike these artists, whose paintings often seemed sketchlike, Caillebotte’s work appears very finished.
The correctly dressed, prosperous couple who are the major figures in the painting politely avert their eyes from the viewer, seemingly unaware of what will soon be a collision of umbrellas with the man entering from the right of Caillebotte’s composition. The other figures and two carriages negotiate their way through the grand spaces of this rather stark urban landscape, avoiding each other as well as the beautifully painted puddles in the cobbled streets. Caillebotte greatly enlarged the illusion of space in what is, in fact, a considerably smaller street corner. The figures are scaled down with respect to the buildings, which are also placed at greater distances from each other than they are in reality. Surely, this was done to give a modern, anonymous grandeur to this utterly bourgeois quarter, succinct in his condemnation: "The subject lacks interest, as do the figures, as does the painting. Caillebotte sees a gray, confused world. Nothing is more emptied of character and expression than these faces." Yet, on balance, Caillebotte’s painting was very seriously reviewed, probably because it was so large, so ambitious, and so thought provoking. Emile Zola praised the artist for his "courage" and for his desire to "treat modern subjects on a life-sized scale." Georges Riviére, Renoir’s friend and "house" critic for the Impressionists in 1877, took on Caillebotte’s detractors by reminding them of the artist’s efforts to produce the picture. "Those who criticize this painting," he said, "had no idea how difficult it was and what technique was needed to bring off a canvas of this size."
Caillebotte’s rigorously controlled technique mirrors the pristine modernity of Haussmann’s rebuilt Paris. He experimented with a plunging perspective to create his unique urban view. The composition is divided into a giant "plus" sign. This painting is a spectacular portrait of the French capital, with its broad boulevards and tunneling vistas, as it was radically reconfigured under Prefect Baron Georges Eugène von Haussmann. Scaffolding is visible in the far background, just to the right of the center lamppost, suggesting that the city’s controversial "Haussmannization" was still in progress. Populated with fashionable women and men, as well as with workers of various sorts, the canvas is an impressive rendition of the new urban environment that the artist both observed and inhabited.But Caillebotte’s work—unlike Claude Monet’s atmospheric renderings of train stations Pierre Auguste Renoir’s anecdotal images of popular entertainment venues - focuses on the psychology of individual experience.
Relying on draftsmanship more than on texture or color, in Paris Street; Rainy Day he created a composition that combines apparent spontaneity with precise choreography. Each well-dressed couple or individual strolls in a different direction, avoiding eye contact; no narrative incidents result from their random proximity. Yet the figures do relate to one another formally, for their glances, postures, and relative sizes all complement and reinforce the converging diagonals that dictate the painting’s perspective. With its large scale, methodical design, and curious stillness, Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day perhaps finds its closest counterpart not in the work of the Impressionists but in that of their successor Georges Seurat, who painted his Sunday on La Grande Jatte - 1884 less than a decade later.
In fact, one wonders whether Georges Seurat, then only eighteen years old and already deeply committed to becoming an artist, went to the Impressionist exhibition of 1877. He was a careful student and would have surely been moved by the deliberate pictorial strategies of Paris Street; Rainy Day. Its combination of order and casualness, its application of contrived structures to the depiction of everyday life—all of this would have appealed to Seurat. And is it folly to ask whether Seurat remembered Caillebotte’s masterpiece when he started his own immense painting, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte seven years later ? Seurat’s masterpiece seems almost too related to Paris Street; Rainy Day not to be in some form an homage to Caillebotte’s earlier masterpiece. Caillebotte’s rain becomes Seurat’s sun. His parapluies (umbrellas) become Seurat’s parasols. His urban street becomes Seurat’s suburban park. His confrontational composition, Seurat’s decorous, planar surface. Yet, all these opposites are resolved when one realizes that each composition is anchored at the right by a couple going for an eternal walk in Paris.
Gustave Caillebotte’s masterpiece was begun in 1876 and finished early in 1877. It shared the spotlight with Auguste Renoir’s Ball at the Moulin de la Galette, now in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and Claude Monet’s series of the Saint-Lazare train station at the Impressionist exhibition of 1877. While the reputations of Renoir and Monet grew rapidly in their own lifetimes, Caillebotte never attained greater fame than when he exhibited this, and other immense canvases at that extraordinary exhibition. There are several reasons for his neglect; the most obvious has to do with Caillebotte’s own wealth and social status. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he lived comfortably insulated from the rocky economic times of the Third French Republic (1871-1940). Perhaps, for that reason, he rarely sold his work and devoted himself, instead, to forming the single most important collection of Impressionist paintings by his colleagues. He gave these paintings to the French nation at his death, and they form the core of the world’s greatest collection of Impressionism, now housed in Paris in the Musée d’Orsay.
Paradoxically, it was not until the Art Institute purchased Paris Street; Rainy Day in 1964 that his best painting became accessible to a wide, international public. It is easy to see just why Caillebotte’s work was appealing in 1877 and remains so today. His carefully crafted surfaces, well-conceived perspectival space, and monumental scale were easily accepted by Parisian audiences accustomed to a similar Salon aesthetic. His asymmetrical compositions, cropping, and uncompromisingly modern subjects were exciting to a more radical sensibility. When standing in front of a Caillebotte, a Parisian viewer could, in a sense, eat his cake and have it too. His aesthetic was undeniably modern, but never strayed from the conservative French Academy of Fine Arts. In the words of an anonymous reviewer of the 1877 exhibition: "Caillebotte is an Impressionist in name only. He knows how to draw and paints more seriously than his friends."
Caillebotte was a lawyer who came from a wealthy family. A large inheritance in 1873 enabled him to pursue painting and gardening. Caillebotte often painted street scenes characterized by a distinctive plunging perspective and unexpected angles of vision. His large-scale urban scenes were especially praised in the press in 1877 and 1878 while those of the other impressionists were strongly criticized. After this, Caillebotte focused on boating and swimming scenes, often working at his estate near the Yerres River outside Paris.
Caillebotte became an important figure in impressionist circles. In addition to his role as a painter, he promoted some of the impressionist group shows and was a patron of artists such as Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and Paul Cézanne. His painting style remained more closely tied to realism than impressionism, but he did adopt the bright colors, loose brushwork, and interest in light that united the group. His subjects domestic interiors, urban scenes, bathers, and boaters were typical of the impressionists.
