How to Read Paintings: Paris Street; Rainy Day by Gustave Caillebotte
A brilliantly composed painting that captures the ebb and flow of a 19th century Parisian boulevard
It’s raining. Men walk in frock coats and top hats, women in heavy, fur-lined dresses. They protect themselves from the rain with umbrellas, whose interplay of grey curves provides much of the visual drama of the scene.
The first thing that always strikes me about this painting of a 19th century Parisian street is the way it is split in half by the green lamppost running down the middle. If you include its reflection on the ground, the lamppost spans the entire height of the painting. This can hardly have been a chance detail on the part of the artist, since it is positioned exactly midway across the canvas, and provides a subtle but decisive framework for the structure of the picture.
The artist was Gustave Caillebotte (pronounced “kai-bot” with a hard “t” at the end). In an early sketch for the painting, Caillebotte included the lamppost as the central motif of the work. A rectangular pencil line drawn around the sketch shows where he planned to begin and end the canvas, and therefore how he always intended to cut off the top of the lamppost so it filled the picture’s height.
On the right-hand side of the lamppost, the figures on the street are shown close up. It is crowded on this side — the umbrellas being carried look as though they’re about to clash. And all three of the figures on this side of the picture are cut off in some way by the edge of the canvas, thereby adding to the impression of a street teeming with people.
One of the pleasures of the painting is the contrast between the left and right hand sides, since on the other side of the image the street is allowed to open out and the figures are shown only in the middle and far distance.
The artist’s use of near and far in this way gives the painting its impressionistic flavour: a snapshot of contemporary Paris, a sense of lively urban motion, the approaching and receding of elements, and the fleeting overlap of unconnected lives as strangers pass each other in the rain.
The location of the painting is the Place de Dublin, known as the Carrefour de Moscou at the time. It is an intersection of roads that lies to the east of the Gare Saint-Lazare in north Paris.
In the artist’s lifetime, the city had changed enormously. He painted this work in 1877, just after the centre of Paris had been largely rebuilt by Georges-Eugène Haussmann under Napoleon III in a massive and controversial programme of urban renewal.
Prior to the regeneration project, sections of Paris had been considered overcrowded, dark and insanitary. One social reformer wrote: “Paris is an immense workshop of putrefaction, where misery, pestilence and sickness work in concert, where sunlight and air rarely penetrate.” Haussmann’s rebuilding of the city was intended to bring air and light to the centre, and to unify the different neighbourhoods with wide boulevards — even if that meant the destruction of large swathes of what stood previously. Much of the Paris we see today is as a result of Haussmann’s radical project.
Caillebotte came from a wealthy Parisian family and enjoyed a privileged upbringing in and around the city. His father made a great fortune from textiles, and this wealth meant that Caillebotte didn’t need to sell his paintings to make a living. Indeed, he was largely absent from the commercial arenas of the Paris art scene of the time and kept most of his works in his own possession. When he died in 1894, aged just 45, the paintings passed onto his brother — as he had no wife or children.
Caillebotte’s wealth also meant that he could buy large works by his Impressionist painter friends. He amassed a great collection during his lifetime, a collection which later became the basis of the Impressionist rooms at the Musee d’Orsay. He also took part in the organisation of Impressionist exhibitions. As such, after his death, he was known more as a patron of the Impressionists than as an artist himself. This may explain why Caillebotte is not hugely well known beyond a handful of his most famous images.
Like many of the Impressionist painters, Caillebotte painted his personal surroundings, depictions of friends and views of his immediate life in the city. These are paintings that delight in the impromptu setting. They treat life as a series of encounters and, not unlike photography, capture fleeting moments from the flow of life.
The Parisian based poet Charles Baudelaire used the term “flâneur” to express the style of this modern type of painter. The flâneur is a French word meaning “stroller”, “lounger” or “saunterer”. In his idealisation of the artist-figure, Baudelaire turned the flâneur into an archetypal city-stroller who represented all that was exciting and vital about living in the burgeoning city environs of 19th century Paris. In Baudelaire’s own words of 1863:
“For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. […] We might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.”
Caillebotte‘s Paris Street; Rainy Day celebrates these new encounters in the regenerated city. If a flâneur was a person who enjoyed their leisure with a lucid eye for detail, then Caillebotte’s brilliant paintings attend to all the details of idling recreation and social manners that his upper-class background had tutored him in.
If you liked this, you may also be interested in my book How to Read Paintings, an examination of fifteen of art’s most enthralling images.
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