Why This Bold Painting Announced the Dawn of Modernity

A composition and subject that defied artistic conventions

Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877) by Gustave Caillebotte. Oil on canvas. 212.2 × 276.2 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, U.S. Image source

This painting stands as one of the most ambitious depictions of 19th-century urban life that exists in art. At ten feet wide, its grand scale and informal, spontaneous subject announce a Paris on the brink of modernity.

People stroll in all directions across a busy boulevard, their fashionable frock coats, hats and slate-grey umbrellas forming a rhythmic pattern against the rain-soaked streets.

For us today, Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day still achieves a palpable, sensory pull. We feel the greased slipperiness of the cobblestones and how the sky is about to brighten: a climatic transition that echoes how the city is in metamorphosis.

What, then, accounts for the painting’s impact, and which artistic choices does Caillebotte employ to animate the scene?

Unusual composition

When viewing this monumental canvas, the first thing that grabs me is the way it is split in half by the green lamppost running right down the middle.

If you include its reflection on the ground, the lamppost spans the entire height of the composition, providing a subtle but incisive left-right division in…