The least Impressionist picture in the show

In April 1877 Caillebotte hung this picture on a wall in Paris and a city that thought it had seen the Impressionists’ worst saw something it didn’t have a category for.

The show the picture debuted at was the 3rd Impressionist Exhibition, held in a rented apartment on rue Le Peletier — the third of what would eventually be eight breakaway exhibitions the group held between 1874 and 1886, organized by themselves outside the official Salon (the annual state-run exhibition that, by long custom, was the only door in town for a serious painting career). The third show was, by quiet consensus, the most coherent and the most ambitious of the eight. About eighteen painters showed. The catalogue listed over two hundred works. Monet hung canvases of the Gare Saint-Lazare — the same railway station whose neighborhood Caillebotte’s picture sat in — done that same year. Renoir hung Bal du moulin de la Galette, the big Sunday-afternoon dance-garden picture, also from 1876. Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, Berthe Morisot, Cézanne — they were all in it. And Gustave Caillebotte hung a clutch of his own canvases, with Paris Street; Rainy Dayas the centerpiece. He was not only an exhibitor: he was one of the show’s organizers and one of its financial backers. The third Impressionist exhibition happened, in part, because Caillebotte’s checkbook made it happen.

So the picture had a prominent spot. Imagine the wall: Monets to the left of it, Renoirs to the right, the boldest experimental color of the era hanging on the same plaster. And then this thing — nine feet wide, gray and white and slate-blue, cool as a stone slab, every cobblestone rendered, every top-hat brim sharp-edged, the whole canvas about the quietness of a wet morning rather than the vibration of a sunny one. Caillebotte was the youngest serious figure in the room. He was twenty-eight years old. He had hung one of the largest and most thoroughly designed pictures in the show — Renoir’s Galette, a few rooms over, was nearly six feet wide and not far behind on scale, so this is not a tallest-canvas-in-the-room claim; it’s a most-engineered-canvas-in-the-room claim.

Here is the punch of it: in the company of the most aggressively Impressionist painting being made in Paris, Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day was the least Impressionist picture in the room. No broken brushwork. No riot of pure color. No dissolved edges. No vibrating dappled light. By the standards the rest of the show was setting, this was almost a return to the old, polished, finished surface the Impressionists were supposed to be rebelling against. And yet the subject — a perfectly unimportant moment on an ordinary Paris street corner, with no story, no myth, no drama, no obvious meaning, just people walking past each other under umbrellas — was as Impressionist as a subject could get. The picture split itself down the middle. Modern subject; classical surface. New eye; old hand. (Some viewers, looking back, would call this a photographicsharpness — meaning that the cropped figures, the deep one-point perspective, and the flat diffuse light reminded them of the cheap photographic prints flooding Paris in the 1870s. The comparison stuck.)

The reviews were mixed, in the way reviews of Caillebotte tended to be his whole career. Some critics were intrigued by the cool surface and the photographic geometry; others were baffled that a man who could clearly draw was bothering to do it for a wet intersection. What the fact pack does not preserve is named-critic, picture-specific quotes — a lot of 1877 review writing is paragraph-level commentary on the whole exhibition rather than verdicts on individual canvases, and Paris Street; Rainy Daymostly got commented on as part of Caillebotte’s overall presence in the show. What is documented is that the picture was visibly there: a big cool wedge of a canvas in the middle of the most argued-about exhibition of the year, signed by a painter most of Paris had not yet decided how to take seriously.

There is one piece of post-1877 record-keeping that needs gentle correction. You will, occasionally, see this picture described as having been “exhibited at the 1877 Paris Salon.” That is wrong. The picture was at the 3rd Impressionist Exhibition in April 1877, which is a completely different event from the Salon — in fact, the Impressionist exhibitions existed because the Salon kept rejecting work like this. The two shows happened in different rooms, organized by different people, judged by different juries (or in the Impressionists’ case, no jury at all), held on different streets, with very different stakes. Anyone who tells you Caillebotte showed Paris Street; Rainy Day at the Salon has mixed up two facts that should never have touched.

Caillebotte was twenty-eight. He had organized one of the most important exhibitions in nineteenth-century French painting, written checks to keep it solvent, and hung a nine-foot picture of a wet Paris intersection in the middle of it. He would keep painting, and keep collecting his friends’ work, for seventeen more years before dying suddenly of a stroke at forty-five in 1894. By then his collection was the most important private hoard of Impressionist painting on Earth, and his bequest of it to the French State would set off a fight that would shape what the Louvre and (eventually) the Musée d’Orsay would look like for the next century. But that fight is a story about other paintings — about the Monets and Renoirs and Pissarros he had bought. Paris Street; Rainy Day itself, the picture in this chapter, was not part of that fight. It stayed home.