Paris Street; Rainy Day

A nine-foot canvas of bourgeois Parisians under umbrellas at a wet Haussmann intersection — painted so cool and so sharp it was the LEAST Impressionist picture in the third Impressionist show.

1. 1
   The couple — well-dressed, half-bored, walking past you

   Just right of center foreground, walking toward you under a single pale lavender-grey umbrella

   The two best-dressed strangers in the picture. The umbrella sheltering them is lavender-grey / pale blue-grey, NOT black — the Art Institute’s varnish cleaning confirmed the cool light tone; under a century of yellowed varnish it had read nearly black, but the cleaned canvas reads pale. The man on the woman’s right in a tall black top hat and dark overcoat; the woman on his left in a small dark hat with a soft veil, a single earring catching a dab of light, a fur-trimmed coat. They are not looking at each other or at you. They are walking past, with the slightly-faraway expression of two people who do this every morning. Their identities are unknown.
2. 2
   Half a man, photograph-style

   Right edge of the canvas, walking past the couple in the opposite direction

   A third figure — top hat, dark overcoat, umbrella — sliced abruptly by the right edge of the picture. You see his left side, his arm, his umbrella; the other half is simply gone. Up until the 1860s no respectable European painting did this. To crop a person in half on the canvas edge was something that happened in photographs, where a passerby would wander into the lens and end up bisected at the frame’s edge. Caillebotte lifted the trick on purpose.
3. 3
   The wedge — still standing in Paris today

   Upper center of the canvas, behind the gas lamppost, where two streets peel away

   The narrow apex of a six-floor cream-stone apartment block points straight at you, like the prow of a ship. Two streets — rue de Turin to one side, rue de Moscou to the other — open out around it. Six floors. Wrought-iron balconies on the regulation second and fifth floors. Mansard roof on top. Go to the Place de Dublin in the 8th arrondissement today and you can still find it.
4. 4
   The morning after rain — pavement still shining

   The lower quarter of the canvas — the whole foreground ground

   Roughly the bottom fourth of the painting is wet cobblestones — gray-blue, individually rendered, each stone catching a faint dab of light reflected off the overcast sky. No puddles, no streaming water; the storm is over. But the city hasn’t dried yet. Caillebotte lightens the top edge of each stone by exactly one value, and that single-value lift is what reads as reflective surface. Stone by stone, across the lower fourth of a nine-foot canvas.
5. 5
   Umbrellas against a sky, not against rain

   Spread across the picture — at least five or six open, in the foreground and middle ground

   Almost every figure is under a plain dark umbrella — EXCEPT the central couple’s, which is the picture’s one cool note of pale lavender-grey. They’re protecting against the threat of more rain, not against rain in progress. And look at the figures — nobody has a cast shadow of any consequence. The sky is a flat, even overcast that lights everything from all directions at once. The umbrellas are pointed at a damp ceiling of cloud.
6. 6
   A single point pulls every line into depth

   Just above and to the right of the central gas lamppost, on the horizon line

   Follow the curbs of the wet pavement. Follow the rooflines on the right. Follow the cornices and the upper window courses. They all run, ruler-straight, toward a single point a little above and right of the central lamppost. This is one-point perspective at its plainest — every line that runs away from you converging on one vanishing point on the horizon. Renaissance painters worked this out in fifteenth-century Florence; almost nobody flaunts it. Caillebotte, an engineer, flaunts it.
7. 7
   A picture in cool colors only

   The whole canvas — sky, stones, walls, clothes

   Look for a warm color anywhere in the picture. Not a soft pink, not a yellow, not an orange, not a red. There isn’t one. Cool grays, slate blue, oyster white, dull black, the dark green of the cast-iron lamppost, the pale lavender-grey of the central umbrella, a single muted-green note on the wagon. The entire human range of warm color has been refused — on purpose. Caillebotte is telling you, by elimination, what kind of light a wet Paris morning has: the kind that drains color out of the city and leaves only its values.