Rain and Rain Paintings Begin --- Days 15/9,10, 11

Walk: No, Rain

Activity: One hour Yoga Room combination cardio, yoga, pt 

Gustave Caillebotte (Fr. 1848-1894), Paris Street, Rainy Weather, 1877, ca 7' x 10', oil on canvas

The San Francisco weather people are predicting six straight days of cold, blustery rain.  So Ciwt thought it would be a good time to visit some ways artists have depicted rain over the years. She begins with one of several masterpieces by the seminal artist, patron, collector Gustave Caillebotte without whom there probably would not be a D'Orsay Museum in Paris.*

The main parts of Baron Haussmann's vast renovation of of Paris (1853-187) were only recently completed when Caillebotte Paris Street, Rainy Weather.  The Parisians had been subjected to decades of dislocation, demolition, massive inconvenience and turmoil.  Few beyond Caillebotte were ready to welcome the new visuals, the steep architecture, the wide boulevards, the new parks, the doubling of the city's size.  But it was Caillebotte's way to embrace the new, and in Paris Street, Rainy Day he turned his artistic eye to how the light, weather and season affected the atmosphere and human activities of this new urban landscape.  

The large painting is owned by the Art Institute of Chicago where it has delighted visitors for nearly a century and a half.  This is what how they present the work on their website:

This complex intersection, just minutes away from the Saint-Lazare train station, represents in microcosm the changing urban milieu of late nineteenth-century Paris. Gustave Caillebotte grew up near this district when it was a relatively unsettled hill with narrow, crooked streets. As part of a new city plan designed by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, these streets were relaid and their buildings razed during the artist’s lifetime. In this monumental urban view, which measures almost seven by ten feet and is considered the artist’s masterpiece, Caillebotte strikingly captured a vast, stark modernity, complete with life-size figures strolling in the foreground and wearing the latest fashions. The painting’s highly crafted surface, rigorous perspective, and grand scale pleased Parisian audiences accustomed to the academic aesthetic of the official Salon. On the other hand, its asymmetrical composition, unusually cropped forms, rain-washed mood, and candidly contemporary subject stimulated a more radical sensibility. For these reasons, the painting dominated the celebrated Impressionist exhibition of 1877, largely organized by the artist himself. In many ways, Caillebotte’s frozen poetry of the Parisian bourgeoisie prefigures Georges Seurat’s luminous Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884, painted less than a decade later.

* See CIWT Day 9/84 and Day 13/230