Gustave Caillebotte never intended to be an artist. Being from a family that can be said safely as bourgeois, he intended to be a lawyer, but when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, he was drafted away, and it was here that he discovered his love for painting. He’d paint the brutality and rough life of soldiers with a beauty and humility that only a comrade can feel. After the war, he enrolled in the best art school in Paris: École des Beaux-Arts. One of his most famous paintings, “Floor Scapers”, was made as he captured the process of building the art studio in the family home. It was because of this painting that Caillebotte entered the Salon and became a part of the Impressionists. By the third exhibition, he was the youngest member of the Impressionists and also considerably wealthy. In 1877, he created a painting that was most different to it’s subordinate artists and their work, but still the most similar. Now considered one of his finest works, Paris Street; Rainy Day, is a fascinating work of art that would be a big controversy if it were revealed how it was painted. Detailed findings show that Caillebotte used vibrant colours such as lavenders for umbrellas (note how smartly he added retractable umbrellas, which were only recently invented), lemon-yellows of the building. High magnification shows the use of grids and pin-holes, making the work highly architectural rather than just dreamy and a portrayal of feelings. Research also showed the use of a camera lucida or an optical prism-like device that captures light to reference an image of light on paper, to perhaps trace. Though that remains speculation and questionable. He also used multiple geometric tools to make this art as accurate as possible, at least structurally. Between the 1830s and 1870s, Haussmann reinvented the streets of Paris to modernise it to what it is today. More than 24 figures walk on the rainy day, all with the same umbrellas and similar clothes to show how everyone came to admire the decades' worth of work, and from their expressions? They seem fairly impressed.
This painting beautifully captures the perfect mood of a rainy day on the freshly modernized streets of Paris. Instead of just a dreamy scene, the structured lines show how the artist used careful geometry to ground the everyday walk in a very real, architectural space. Ultimately, it reflects how people of the time blended into this clean, new urban world, making it feel both relatable and incredibly organized.
