Paris Street; Rainy Day
Gustave Caillebotte · 1877
The story
Paris Street; Rainy Day (French: Rue de Paris, temps de pluie) is a large 1877 oil painting by the French artist Gustave Caillebotte, now at the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois. The work shows a Parisian street scene of pedestrians in rainy weather crossing a boulevard intersection in the present-day Place de Dublin, a square in the eighth arrondissement. It is the best known of Caillebotte's several cityscapes linked to Paris's reconstruction under Napoleon III and Georges-Eugène Haussmann in the mid-19th century. Paris Street exemplifies the artist's views on modernity.
Caillebotte made a number of preliminary sketches in graphite and oil. The composition shows 24 mostly bourgeois pedestrians, dominated by a foreground couple with an umbrella, who are staring outside of the viewer's field of vision. The painting takes the form of a photorealistic cityscape, departing from the typical style of Impressionist art, representative of a Paris that appears austere and hostile to human interaction. Caillebotte employed several visual techniques to create the illusion of three-dimensional space, such as linear two-point perspective and colour effects.
Paris Street was first shown in April 1877 at the Third Impressionist Exhibition in Paris, where it was widely praised for its photorealism and precision. It was not displayed publicly again until a posthumous retrospective exhibition in 1894. Caillebotte bequeathed the work to his youngest brother Martial, and it remained in obscurity, in the family's possession, before being sold to art collectors in the mid-20th century. The Art Institute of Chicago's acquisition in 1964 accelerated a revival of Caillebotte's art, increasing his reputation as an artist in the public eye.
- Artist
- Gustave Caillebotte
- Date
- 1877
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, United States
- Movement
- Impressionism
- Medium
- oil paint, canvas
- Size
- 212.2 × 276.2 cm
Story adapted from the Wikipedia article and its contributors, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Facts from Wikidata (CC0). Image: Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
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