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Date : 1877
Sizes : 2.76 m x 2.12 m
Material : Oil on canvas
Acquisition : Charles H. and Mary F.S. Worcester Collection (1964)
Impressionism
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French Painting
Painting
Area related
Paris IXčme (France)
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| Description |  |
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Gustave Caillebotte selected an intersection near the Saint-Lazare train station for his subject, distorting the size of the buildings and the distance between them to create a wide-angle view. The artist used a gaslight to separate the foreground from the middle and distant views.
Caillbotte's aesthetic was undeniably modern, although he never strayed far from the canons of taste propagated by the conservative French Academy. In "Paris Street; Rainy Day", life-sized figures walk toward us on the sidewalk of the rue de Turin just before it crosses the rue de Moscou. This complex intersection, part of the new city plan of Paris designed by Georges Haussmann, was located just minutes from the Saint-Lazare train station. Caillebotte attained his greatest fame when he exhibited this masterpiece and other immense canvases at the Impressionist exhibition of 1877, which he organized and financed. The carefully crafted surfaces, well-conceived perspectival space, and monumental scale of this work were easily accepted by Parisian audiences accustomed to a similar Salon aesthic. At the same time, the painting's asymmetrical composition, cropping of forms, and uncompromisingly contemporary subject of urban daily life were exciting to a more radical sensibility.
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