Built like a building

Most of the Impressionists were broke. That is a thing worth saying out loud, because it shapes how they painted, what they painted, and what they let themselves try. Monet famously begged loans from friends to keep eating. Renoir was thirty-five, unmarried, sleeping in studios. Pissarro had a family to feed and no buyers. A picture had to be a size you could carry up to a buyer’s apartment. A canvas had to be a size you could afford to prime. Big canvases cost money the way big anything costs money — proportional to surface area — and a Salon-scale history painting on stretched linen could cost more than a month’s rent before you’d put a single mark on it.

Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894) had none of these problems. His father owned a military-textile firm — he made beds, blankets, and uniforms for the French army, in industrial quantities — and when the father died in 1874, Gustave inherited at twenty-six. Independently, comfortably, seriously wealthy. The version of him you sometimes see floating around — “Caillebotte, the wealthy amateur” — is wrong on two counts at once. He was wealthy, yes. He was not an amateur. He had trained as a civil engineer (a profession devoted to designing roads, bridges, water systems, the unglamorous infrastructure that makes a modern city run), and he painted with the discipline of someone who’d been taught to draft straight lines and calculate angles. He was also, increasingly, the financial backbone of the Impressionist movement: when the group’s exhibitions needed rent for the hall, somebody to underwrite the catalogue, somebody to buy a Renoir or a Pissarro from the back wall so the painter could pay his butcher, Caillebotte was the somebody. Several of the Impressionist exhibitions happened because he wrote checks for them. Call him an engineer-painter who could afford to paint without selling, and you have the shape of him right.

What he did with that freedom, on this particular canvas, was paint very large. Paris Street; Rainy Day is about 6 ft 11½ in tall by 9 ft 0¾ in wide (the Art Institute of Chicago, which owns it, gives the metric measurement as 212.2 × 276.2 cm). For scale: this picture is wider than two refrigerators set side by side, and taller than most doorways. It is history-painting scale — meaning the canvas size that the Paris art establishment reserved for ancient battles, the death of kings, classical myth, and similar serious matters. To paint a contemporary Paris street corner on a canvas this size was a quiet provocation. You could fit a real-life couple on this picture at almost half their actual height. Stand close to it in the gallery and the bourgeois man in his top hat is looking at you from very near his real size.

Then the question of how he painted it, because this is where the engineer steps to the front. Caillebotte did what almost no other Impressionist would have bothered to do for a street scene: he worked out the perspective in advance, on paper, with the kind of geometric precision you’d use to design a railway viaduct. Perspective, briefly, is the trick painters use to make a flat canvas feel like it has depth. One-point perspective — the simplest version — works by picking a single point on the horizon (the vanishing point) and drawing every line that runs away from you toward that point. Train tracks running into the distance, the edges of a long hallway, the curbs of a straight boulevard: in real life they’re parallel, but on a flat picture they appear to converge on one spot, and if you draw them as if they do, the picture pops into depth. Renaissance painters figured this out in fifteenth-century Florence. By Caillebotte’s day every art student knew it. Almost nobody bothered to flaunt it.

Caillebotte flaunted it. Look at the picture and follow the curbs of the wet pavement, the rooflines of the apartment blocks on the right, the cornices, the upper-window courses — they all run, ruler-straight, toward a single point a little above and to the right of the central gas lamppost. You can almost see his preparatory grid. Surviving studies for the picture confirm he made detailed drawings of the architecture and the figures before he ever touched the big canvas. This is not a fast plein-air sketch caught in a moment of light. (Plein airmeans “open air” — painting outdoors, in front of the real scene, the way Monet worked. The opposite of studio work.) This is a designed picture, built indoors from studies, with the architecture worked out the way you’d work out a bridge.

And the paint surface itself is cool. This is the headline difference between Caillebotte and the painters hanging in the same rooms with him. A Monet from this year reads as a vibrating mosaic of broken brushstrokes, every patch of color a separate dab, the whole canvas alive with visible paint. A Renoir from this year is a haze of pink and blue dappling, surfaces dissolved into atmosphere. Caillebotte’s Paris Street, by contrast, has a smooth, even, almost photographic finish — the brushwork is mostly invisible at viewing distance. The cobblestones are individual cobblestones, painted one by one. The top hats are sharp-edged. The wet shine on the pavement is rendered, not suggested. If Monet was painting how an eye genuinely receives a scene through hazy air, Caillebotte was painting how an engineer’s mind knows a scene is constructed. The cool quiet of the surface — no warm tone anywhere, no visible bravura brushwork, no sketch-like passages — is the picture’s whole emotional register. It is the most Impressionist subject (modern Paris, an unimportant moment, ordinary people) painted with the least Impressionist hand.

Which is going to be a problem in April. Hold that thought.