Dusty Art

My prior Art posts can be found HERE.

How do we move away from being a civilization that produces art that causes comments like, “my five year old could make this,” back to being one that creates beauty and inspires deep questions? We must reject modernity and embrace tradition. To embrace tradition, we must first learn about it.

Let’s study art history together.

Paris Street; Rainy Day

Artist	Gustave Caillebotte
Year	1877
Medium	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	212.2 cm × 276.2 cm (83.5 in × 108.7 in)
Location	Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago

This painting is considered an impressionist painting. Impressionism was a 19th century art movement defined by visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, unusual visual angles, and inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience. The movement often produced work that had a somewhat dreamy (or dream-like) quality. Caillebotte’s piece here has a dreamy feel to it, no doubt, but there’s also a very striking realism in this work, too. It looks very much like a photograph taken on an old camera.

It’s a brilliant painting and one of the artist’s most famous in his career. I particularly enjoy – as you might expect from the fact it is an impressionist work – the impressive use of light. This is done best, IMO, with the tops of the umbrellas. It’s a small detail, too, but I really love the diffused way that the people who are walking cast their shadows.

When I see the work, I am filled with sadness. The gloomy gray of a rainy day plays its role, no doubt, but I also see a world that doesn’t exist and perhaps can never exist again. The sadness for me comes from the realization that this moment in time was not so very long ago. In the grand scheme, 150 years is not within the lifetime of anyone still living, but it was within the lifetime of a person someone still living might have met when young. For me it’s the sadness you might feel when you’ve set out a long journey and just lost sight of your house. Relatively speaking, Victorian Europe is just a bit beyond the horizon now. Somehow it feels farther away than that.

(more on the work, via wiki)

Paris Street; Rainy Day (French: Rue de Paris, temps de pluie) is a large Impressionist oil painting completed by French artist Gustave Caillebotte in 1877. The work portrays a scene of pedestrians in rainy weather crossing a boulevard intersection in the present-day Place de Dublin, a square in the eighth arrondissement of Paris. 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; Rainy Day 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 the foreground couple with an umbrella staring outside of the viewer’s field of vision. Unusually for an Impressionist painting, Paris Street; Rainy Day takes the form of a photorealistic cityscape, representative of a homogenized Paris. Caillebotte employs several visual techniques to create the illusion of three-dimensional space, mainly through linear two-point perspective, colour effects, and repoussoir.

Paris Street; Rainy Day debuted in April 1877 at the Third Impressionist Exhibition, 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 the family’s possession before being sold to wealthy art collectors in the mid-20th century. The painting has been in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1964, when it was purchased during a reappraisal of Caillebotte’s work.

Background

Gustave Caillebotte first met with Impressionist artists presumably no later than the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874. He may have been courted for said occasion but declined because he had been committed to the Salon of 1875 for his submission Les raboteurs de parquet, which was ultimately rejected. In February 1876, Caillebotte received an invitation from Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri Rouart to participate in the Second Impressionist Exhibition that April; Les raboteurs de parquet and Young Man at His Window were some of the eight paintings the painter showcased at the event. Over time, he used money from his inheritance to help fund the annual Impressionists shows as an organizer, starting with the Third Impressionist Exhibition in January 1877.

Beginning in the 1850s, Napoleon III placed Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the prefect of the Seine department, in charge of overseeing the mass modernisation of Paris. Commonly referred to by the neologism “Haussmannisation”, the project saw the construction of parks, squares, housing, kiosks, street beautification, about 137 km (85 mi) of boulevards, and thorough infrastructural improvements to sewage, water management, and public transportation. A consequence was the displacement of thousands of mostly working class residents, including 75 percent of Île de la Cité, to slums in the outskirts of Paris. Caillebotte and his family moved to a large, four-story mansion in Paris’s eighth arrondissement amid the reconstruction, built on a parcel of land his father Martial purchased from the city on January 15, 1866. Much of Caillebotte’s oeuvre is linked to this period of upheaval, featuring depictions of Paris emblematic of his views of modernity.

Preparation

There are 23 surviving studies in graphite and oil paint. Caillebotte spent most of the sketches fleshing out the form of the pedestrians, varying their pose and form. The most elaborate, Study for Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877), focuses on the architecture, is in graphite on laid paper, and features a freehand sketch of the area and geometric line work reinforcing the painting’s motifs and perspective. Background details are small and contrast with the drawing’s broad field of vision, creating a wide angle effect, which implies the use of an optical device for assistance. The prevailing theory proposes that Caillebotte traced his preparatory sketches from photos. Most scholars agree that he deployed photography in some form to produce the works, though a 2015 investigative report from the Art Institute of Chicago contests the assertion and concluded that Caillebotte likely made use of a camera lucida. The oldest pencil sketch, View from rue de Madrid toward rue de Lisbonne (1875), renders a different intersection in the city, though it is cited as a precursor to Paris Street; Rainy Day.

The oil on canvas measures 54 by 65 cm (21 by 26 in) and is more in line with Caillebotte’s Impressionist works. It develops the colour palette while modifying the perspective scheme and arrangement of objects in the compositional space. The dominant pigments are lead white, ochres and chrome yellows, umber, vermilion, cobalt blue and ultramarine, cobalt violet, and viridian.

Description

Paris Street; Rainy Day is an oil painting on canvas measuring 212.2 by 276.2 cm (83.5 by 108.7 in) in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois. It is signed and dated in greyish-brown paint to the lower left: “G. Caillebotte. 1877”. The work was restored in 1964 and again after the 2012–2013 exhibition cycle, its condition confirmed via X-ray, infrared, microscopic, and ultraviolet imaging. A technical examination of the piece found that Paris Street; Rainy Day had been preserved under a layer of varnish applied in the early 1900s that steadily deteriorated, indicated by fingerprints, the fading of colours, and dark spots on the painted surface.

This painting depicts pedestrians in the rain traversing the intersection of the rue de Turin, rue de Moscou, rue Clapeyron, and the ru de Saint-Pétersbourg in present-day Place de Dublin, a square near the site of Caillebotte’s apartment in the eighth arrondissement of Paris. There are 24 individuals dispersed throughout in fashions suggestive of their bourgeois class and the winter. Men are dressed in dark trousers and buttoned overcoats concealing a white linen shirt, while women sport dark walking dresses with embellished drapery that they carry off the ground to avoid getting dirty. Umbrellas are steel-framed and likely made of stretched waterproof silk. The painting positions a minority of workers in the background: a maid, two cab drivers, and a house painter carrying a ladder.

The bourgeois couple in the forground carry an umbrella and stare at something outside of the viewer’s field of vision. They are relaxed in posture; according to the art historian Mary Morton, the two exemplify Haussmannian Paris by exuding an “impassivity, sense of propriety, and entitlement.” The man is the archetypal flâneur, an idle stroller, whose open coat contrasts with the painting’s presentation of the other males. Underneath he wears a white shirt, a black knotted cravat, a waistcoat and fitted grey trousers, his outfit completed with a top hat as an adornment. His companion is dressed in a brown wool two-piece gown equipped with two rows of buttons, black velvet sleeves, and fur trim at the hips, collar and cuffs. The woman’s adornments include a fur toque, a veil and an earring on the left ear. She and the man are caressed, the only subjects that are physically bound, though two men in the far left foreground and two women in the far distance share comparable proximity. The art historian Michael Marinnan compares Paris Street; Rainy Day to Le Pont de l’Europe (1876) because of their portrayals of class relations and geographically adjacent settings. The Art Institute of Chicago’s scholarly catalogue of Caillebotte’s work designates the pieces as “ambitious, accessible, and readily understandable representations of upper-middle-class residents in the new neighborhoods around the Gare Saint-Lazare.”

Style

Caillebotte illustrates Paris Street; Rainy Day with a photorealistic cityscape, departing from conventional forms of Impressionist art. The piece was created with brush strokes of up to 1.5 cm (0.59 in), with substantial changes to the surface made by painting over or removing layers with a palette knife to start anew. Its colour palette comprises lead and zinc white, cobalt, ultramarine and cerulean blue, emerald green, viridian, Naples and cadmium yellow, and several iron-based pigments. Some have argued Paris Street; Rainy Day more so resembles academic art in scale, perspective, and composition. The art historian Kirk Varnedoe considered that Caillebotte’s stylistic choices foreshadowed the techniques of French Neo-Impressionist artists that emerged in the 1880s.

Paris Street; Rainy Day reflects Caillebotte’s preoccupation with life in post-Haussmannised Paris. His representation of the city is austere, one that appears hostile to human interaction, evoking the scale and uniformity of space frequently cited in critiques of Haussmannisation. The architectural backdrop is homogeneous and dominating, within a setting featuring no distinct topography. Pedestrians seem disengaged from each other and their surroundings, their expressions either covered or lacking intricate detail; this isolation finds further expression in the umbrellas and rain. Visual cues, such as colour palette and the wet cobblestone pavement, evoke the weather rather than literal rainfall. Weather effects may pose a deeper symbolic function; some scholars have proposed that these aspects convey the restoration of Paris for the bourgeoisie from insurrection.

Caillebotte achieves the illusion of depth through linear two-point perspective, wherein the pictorial space converges at two vanishing points. Distance is further accentuated by strokes of grey and blue hues on the limestone building facades and Caillebotte’s use of repoussoir with the foreground couple. The green lamppost splits the canvas into halves, setting up a hierarchy of space up to the horizon. Given its compositional framework, historians have found similarities to Renaissance art, in particular Flagellation of Christ (1459–1460) by Italian painter and mathematician Piero della Francesca.

Provenance

In the immediate aftermath of the death of his younger brother René in 1876, Caillebotte devised a will stipulating the disposition of paintings in his personal collection to the French state for display at the Musée du Luxembourg and then the Louvre. State officials at first were reluctant to accept the bequest; the Luxembourg did not have enough exhibition space for the collection, and the state imposed a clause dictating no more than three or four works be shown at a time for each artist at the museum. This initiated protracted negotiations between Caillebotte’s youngest brother Martial and Renoir, the former as an heir, and the advisory committee of the Musées Nationaux after the artist’s death in 1894. The parties reached an agreement in January 1895, which conferred works not chosen by the state to the Caillebotte heirs. The state finalised the bequest on February 26, 1896, transferring ownership of 38 of the 67 paintings originally offered.

Paris Street; Rainy Day remained in the possession of the Caillebottes by way of Martial, laying in obscurity at a family residence. The American art collector Walter P. Chrysler Jr. acquired the painting in 1954 and kept it until no later than 1964, after which it was sold to Daniel Wildenstein through the gallery Wildenstein & Company. In 1964, the Art Institute of Chicago purchased Paris Street; Rainy Day from Wildenstein with funds allocated by its associate director John Maxon. It was known under several different names before the Art Institute of Chicago renamed the piece permanently in 1991, based on the English translation of the French title advertised at the Third Impressionist Exhibition.

Reception

Caillebotte debuted Paris Street; Rainy Day alongside two other streetscape paintings—Le Pont de l’Europe and The House Painters—and two portraits in April 1877 at the Third Impressionist Exhibition. Critics described the painting as one the exhibition’s definitive pieces, with one naming Paris Street; Rainy Day as “la masterpiece de l’exposition” (lit. ’the masterpiece of the exhibition’). It was widely praised for its photorealism, to the extent that Caillebotte was perceived as Impressionist merely in name. The writer Paul Sébillot claimed in one of the exhibition’s earliest reviews that Paris Street; Rainy Day provides “some areas of arresting reality”, from an artist whose work offers a glimpse of what photography could look like as a fully realised medium. Most critics noted the precise architectural details and the painting’s presentation of a sterile urban space, though made no mention of pedestrian interactions. Paris Street; Rainy Day was not without criticism; it drew disapproval for its lack of rain, muted tints, and Caillebotte’s manipulation of perspective.

Paris Street; Rainy Day was not displayed publicly again until a June 1894 posthumous retrospective organised by the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, which brought together 122 of his paintings. By this time, Caillebotte had waned in estimation as an artist, and the highly publicised dispute about the execution of his bequest further obscured his reputation, let alone the show.

Legacy

Caillebotte’s reputation gradually diminished in the final twelve years of his life. While Caillebotte was an established painter in his lifetime, his renown had been sustained from his initial success with Les raboteurs de parquet and then his role as a leader of the Impressionists. From the early 1880s, the artist retreated from exhibitions to focus on hobbies in gardening, yachting, and stamp collecting, significantly reducing his output of artwork and critical attention thereof. Caillebotte rarely loaned his art, did not sell to clients as he did not need to paint for a living to support himself, nor were there any reproductions in circulation. Thanks to publicity from the bequest, his reputation as a collector of Impressionist paintings eclipsed his artistic contributions. Early discourse about Impressionism thus tended to focus on Caillebotte as a patron and friend of more prolific artists if at all, with only scant coverage of his work.

The Art Institute of Chicago’s acquisition of Paris Street; Rainy Day was the most significant catalyst generating renewed interest in Caillebotte’s art in the 20th century. His revival slowly enhanced through international exhibitions starting in the 1950s that increased visibility of his paintings in the public, and he found favour with a new generation of historians and critics. Caillebotte’s fame reached its peak at the turn of the millennium, helped by the 1986 show The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874–1886 and the 1994–1996 retrospective Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist, both of which included Paris Street; Rainy Day among several recognisable and lesser known works. Paris Street; Rainy Day remains one of the Art Institute of Chicago’s most popular paintings and a key work in touring exhibitions run by the museum in the 21st century, the most recent being the year-long retrospective Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men from October 2024 to October 2025.