Paris street rainy day demonstrates

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Applied Humanities

Themes in Visual Art Caillebotte By James Romaine 2 Module Two: Introduction to the Humanities, continued / Page 2.1.2 Caillebotte On this page: 0 of 8 attempted (0%) Objective: Analyze a painting by Gustave Caillebotte to identify its theme.

The painting on this page exemplifies what many viewers think of as “art.” The main subject seems immediately apparent. However, as with all great works of art, there are layers of significance that are revealed over time—through closer study, critical thinking, and research.

On this page, you will examine elements of an Impressionist painting by Gustave Caillebotte to determine its theme. Use the information and images provided to answer the questions below.

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Paris Street; Rainy Day

This is an oil painting of a Parisian intersection in the late 1800s. It has overcast skies and is apparently raining. Almost all of the pedestrians are walking with umbrellas. The couple in the foreground are sharing an umbrella. She is dressed in a fur-trimmed skirt, jacket, and hat. There is an earring visible in her left ear. She is holding on to her companion’s left arm with her right hand. He is dressed in pants, a buttoned vest, white shirt, bow tie, coat, and top hat. He is holding the umbrella. They are both looking to their right. A man with his back to the viewer is passing the couple on their left. He is wearing a top hat and coat and carrying an umbrella. The viewer sees only half of him. In the background are other pedestrians crossing the street and walking on the sidewalks. There is a triangular building in the background. The streets are paved with rectangular stones. There is a lamppost visible behind the couple sharing the umbrella. The painting is realistic and looks almost like a photograph.

Click to enlarge

Gustave Caillebotte. Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877. Oil on canvas. 212.2 x 276.2 cm (83 1/2 x 108 3/4 in.). Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection, 1964.336. The Art

Institute of Chicago.

Gustave Caillebotte

Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877

Era/Culture/Movement: Impressionism

Medium: Oil on canvas

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Dimensions: 6′ 11.5″ × 9′ 0.75″

Location: Art Institute of Chicago

Several figures navigate the streets of the modern city of Paris.

As you view this work for the first time, think about its theme. This painting explores how human experience and relationships are shaped by the environment of the modern city.

Short-Answer Question

After this first viewing, what do you see in this painting that explores how human experience and relationships are shaped by the environment of the modern city?

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Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day is like a postcard from the past—albeit a very large one. At nearly seven feet by nine feet, this painting makes viewers feel as if they could walk right into the painting and be in Paris. Conversely, the figures in the painting seem like they could step into our world.

Working in late 19th-century France, Caillebotte was active in a movement that became known as Impressionism. The Impressionists were a loosely affiliated group of artists who showed their work together in self-organized exhibitions. Coming from a wealthy family, Caillebotte helped to financially support this movement. Paris Street; Rainy Day was included in the third Impressionist exhibition.

One feature of the Impressionist movement was an emphasis on subjects drawn from everyday life. Caillebotte’s painting demonstrates that art based on observation, such as images of modern men and women, is no less creative than art based on invention, such as classical depictions of mythological gods and goddesses (a point that many art critics of the late 19th century would not have agreed with).

At a time when the art establishment favored works of art depicting historical, mythological, or biblical subjects, Caillebotte boldly turned his attention to a transitory moment. Employing a dramatic perspective that might have reminded viewers of Italian Renaissance paintings in the Louvre, Paris Street; Rainy Day was a celebration of the ordinary. Like Édouard Manet and Claude Monet, Caillebotte embraced the

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challenge put forward by the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire to be a “painter of modern life.”

Paris Street; Rainy Day depicts a specific place in Paris (one that still exists today). The intersection of boulevards becomes the setting for a cross section of social classes. Caillebotte captures the energy of the city as figures stroll past each other, all of them on their way to some destination outside the frame of the painting. Some of the figures are in pairs; others are on their own.

The piece is unusual for a 19th-century painting in that it has no single fixed focal point. Depicting a seemingly random moment of figures in motion, this work evokes the recently developed medium of photography. Figures move to the right and left, toward the viewer and away from the viewer. Their movements are framed by the urban architecture’s geometric order.

The seeming spontaneity of the moment depicted is supported by the painting’s carefully organized construction. The off-center—but not off-balance—composition is oriented around a gaslight lamppost. This post, and its reflection on the wet pavement, divides the painting from top to bottom. Caillebotte has balanced larger figures at the right with an illusion of a greater depth of space at the left. The city and the people are actually balanced by each other. The compositional and conceptual success of this painting lies in the subtle equilibrium that Caillebotte achieves, a harmony that holds the painting, and the city, together.

Paris Street; Rainy Day is also visually unified by light. The composition is replete with open umbrellas, each capturing a soft tone of light that comes from the upper left.

But the calm orderliness of the scene disguises some of the uncertainty present. The wide boulevards that meet in the middle of the picture had only recently been constructed as part of a large urban redesign. In the 1850s and 1860s, Paris experienced a transformation that was both beautiful and brutal. At the direction of Baron Georges Haussmann, the city’s maze of dark streets was transformed into a system of wide boulevards filled with light. These long, straight avenues, which radiated out from city centers, were lined with Beaux-Arts architecture. To create these new plazas and parks, however, entire communities had to be forcibly evicted, and neighborhoods were demolished.

The aspirations and anxieties of the modern world form the undercurrent of Paris Street; Rainy Day. Certain details of Caillebotte’s painting, such as scaffolding in the center background or the man in the middle ground carrying a ladder, suggest that the renovations to the city are never finished. Having a life of its own, the city keeps

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changing. The people that we see in the painting are still discovering how the urban redesign of Paris affects how they live their lives.

As stated above, Paris Street; Rainy Day explores how human experience and relationships are shaped by the environment of the modern city. The most obvious way in which Caillebotte carries out this exploration is in his use of architecture. The buildings not only divide the world depicted in the painting; they also organize the composition of the painting itself. This deliberate connection between the subject depicted and the means by which it is depicted is part of what keeps the painting fresh for the viewer and of interest to scholars.

There aren’t very many paintings of rainy weather in the history of art, and so art historians have speculated about why Caillebotte chose this subject. Of course, the answer to this question may be that he simply liked rainy weather. Or perhaps the artist found that the wet surfaces of the cobblestone streets and umbrellas had a certain visual effect, a shimmer, that captured light in a particular way.

There is another possible motivation for painting people walking with umbrellas. The umbrella delineates a personal or private space. In Caillebotte’s painting, everyone shares the public spaces of the streets and sidewalks. But their umbrellas visualize the fact that they all have to negotiate this public space while attempting to respect the space of others and maintain their own sense of personal space. If we look more closely at the painting, it seems as if the rain has perhaps stopped, and light has filled the space. The brightness of the sky (now even more evident after a restoration that removed old layers of yellowing varnish) suggests that the sunlight is beginning to break through. Yet all the umbrellas are still up, because they serve the artist’s larger purpose.

Caillebotte’s use of umbrellas is one of several devices in Paris Street; Rainy Day that help to visualize the tension between public and private space in a crowded city. In the lower right corner, for example, a man enters the frame of the painting. He is directly in the path of a man and woman who, looking to their right (our left), seem entirely unaware of him. Initially, the way in which the painting’s composition stations the three figures side by side disguises their impending collision. But the longer we look at the painting, the more the undercurrent of urban tension rises to the surface.

Because it is more than merely an image of middle-class Parisians created for the viewer’s delight and imagination, Paris Street; Rainy Day can still address the 21st- century viewer. As the world becomes increasingly urbanized and interconnected, perhaps our challenges are not so different from those of Caillebotte’s figures. This

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painting demonstrates how a work of art can relate something about the human experience in the past to the viewer’s experiences in the present.

Paris Street; Rainy Day

This is an oil painting of a Parisian intersection in the late 1800s. It has overcast skies and is apparently raining. Almost all of the pedestrians are walking with umbrellas. The couple in the foreground are sharing an umbrella. She is dressed in a fur-trimmed skirt, jacket, and hat. There is an earring visible in her left ear. She is holding on to her companion’s left arm with her right hand. He is dressed in pants, a buttoned vest, white shirt, bow tie, coat, and top hat. He is holding the umbrella. They are both looking to their right. A man with his back to the viewer is passing the couple on their left. He is wearing a top hat and coat and carrying an umbrella. The viewer sees only half of him. In the background are other pedestrians crossing the street and walking on the sidewalks. There is a triangular building in the background. The streets are paved with rectangular stones. There is a lamppost visible behind the couple sharing the umbrella. The painting is realistic and looks almost like a photograph.

Click to enlarge

Gustave Caillebotte. Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877. Oil on canvas. 212.2 x 276.2 cm (83 1/2 x 108 3/4 in.). Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection, 1964.336. The Art

Institute of Chicago.

Short-Answer Question

Count and describe the people in Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day.

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Where are they going? What are they doing? Are they together or alone? Can we tell anything about how they are feeling or what they are thinking?

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How does the artist use the arrangement of the boulevards and the structure of the architecture to give organization to the image?

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What does this work tell us about life in Paris in the late 19th century?

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What can we learn from this painting about the human experience that can be applied to our own experience?

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Response Board Imagine yourself in this painting. What sorts of sounds and smells might you experience?

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Short-Answer Question

Share your thoughts with your peers...

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After reading the context and analysis above and looking more closely at the painting, what do you now see in this painting that explores how human experiences and relationships are shaped by the environment of the modern city?

No response saved yet. close