Paris Street; Rainy Day

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.

Subject
rue de Turin, rue Clapeyron, rue de Moscou, man, rain, woman