Gustave Caillebotte painted Paris the way a camera would frame it, decades before that kind of cropped, wide-angle look was common in art. This is his largest and most ambitious painting, and in person the foreground couple is nearly life-size.
What you're looking at
Paris Street; Rainy Day shows a rebuilt Paris intersection in 1877, all sharp new stone buildings and wide boulevards, wet cobblestones reflecting a gray sky. A well-dressed couple shares an umbrella in the foreground while other Parisians move through the rain behind them.
A painting engineered like a photograph
Infrared imaging by the Art Institute of Chicago, which owns the painting, found actual pinholes at several distinct vanishing points on the canvas. Caillebotte anchored a straightedge at each pinhole to construct the street's perspective with real precision, first sketching the scene with a camera lucida and then scaling that drawing up roughly sevenfold onto the final canvas.
The lamppost near the center isn't decoration — conservators found it marked as a construction point in Caillebotte's preparatory sketch, and it splits the finished canvas almost exactly in half. Even the umbrella the couple shares was cutting-edge for 1877: the retractable umbrella had only recently been invented.
One detail to look for
Look to the right edge of the canvas, where a single figure is cropped so only his back and top hat are visible. Photography was brand new in the 1870s, and cropping a figure like this, mid-frame, was a genuinely daring choice for a painting at the time.
See it at its real size
The original is enormous, 212.2 x 276.2 cm, so every size we offer is honestly marked as a Room Edition rather than a claim of full scale. Shop the canvas print.