The archive / Impressionism / Paris Street; Rainy Day
Paris Street; Rainy Day
Gustave Caillebotte · 1848–1894
3 variations + a matched story print, every standard frame ratio. sRGB · up to 300 DPI · personal-use license.
Print it your way — at home, a local shop, or a gallery print delivered to your door. See the printing guide →
Sizes in the download
Print-ready files at every standard frame ratio below — the full image, nothing cropped:
The print is crisp at 300 DPI up to about A1, and stays sharp at 150 DPI from across the room, out to about 40×60″.
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The work
A rainy day with no rain in it.
Look for a raindrop and you won't find one. Caillebotte gives you the weather sideways instead: a sheen on the cobblestones, the dark gloss of the umbrellas held overhead. The wet is everywhere and nowhere. He paints the aftermath, the reflection, the held-open canopy, and lets you supply the downpour. No falling rain at all.
Look closer
This is a real corner of Paris.
That intersection is a real one, near where Caillebotte lived: the rue de Turin meeting the rue de Moscou, in the new Haussmann district by the Gare Saint-Lazare. When it hung as catalogue number 1 at the third Impressionist exhibition in April 1877, he titled it the flatly generic 'Rue de Paris; temps de pluie' — playing down the spot anyone local would have known.
Why it matters
Nothing here was left to chance.
That settled, photographic calm took some doing. X-rays have since shown the lamppost lengthened and widened, the cobblestones gone over more than once, and two elements added late: the large man with his back to us at right, the carriage at far left. Caillebotte moved the picture's right edge at least twice before he let it stand.
[This painting] gives an idea of what photography will become.— Paul Sébillot, art critic, reviewing the third Impressionist exhibition, 1877
The file & the facts
- Title
- Paris Street; Rainy Day
- Artist
- Gustave Caillebotte
- Year
- 1877
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Original
- 212.2 × 276.2 cm
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Rights
- Public-domain painting · open access · Art Institute of Chicago — Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection, 1964.336 (CC0, courtesy)
- File
- sRGB · JPEG · 150–300 DPI
