Gustave Caillebotte’s “Paris: A Rainy Day.”
Seeing Art from Outside-In and Inside-Out.
Sharing a Moment and a Message within a Picture.
Burton Weltman
Preface: Looking for the Story in a Picture.
When I look at a painting, my attention is drawn first to what could be called the aesthetics of the thing. That is, do I think it looks good. But then I look to see whether there is a story in the painting. That is, what do I think might have happened before and after the moment captured by the artist, why did the artist choose to represent these subjects, objects and/or shapes, and what are the relationships among them. We humans are story-making and story-telling creatures, and I think that we tend to look for stories in almost everything we see. And that includes paintings, even if we are not aware of our doing it.
The stories implicit in a painting can have an effect, even if subliminal, on our appreciation of a picture. And just as the artist’s aesthetic choices and effects can influence our view of the world around us, so, too, I think the stories embedded in a picture may affect our feelings about the world. They may make us feel more optimistic or pessimistic, may reinforce a collective sense or an individualistic orientation, may encourage us to reflection or to action, and may otherwise reinforce or contradict our feelings about things.
I think that is particularly the case with Gustave Caillebotte’s painting of “Paris: A Rainy Day.” It is a beautiful picture of a street corner in Paris, but it can also be seen as a humorous burlesque of the haute-bourgeoisie and a poignant gesture of human solidarity across space and time.
Describing the Painting: Who, What, and Where.
Gustave Caillebotte was one of the first and most influential of the Impressionist painters in the late nineteenth century. “Paris: A Rainy Day” is a city-scene that was painted by Caillebotte in 1877. It is his best-known work. The picture has been exhibited at The Art Institute in Chicago since 1964, where it is prominently displayed and is very popular among visitors. Combining Impressionist technique with realist results, it is a large painting and the figures in the foreground are almost life-sized. The picture draws the viewer in. It seems almost as though we are stepping into the action. Most viewers look at the painting for a long time, seemingly navigating their way into and out of the scene.
The picture is set as a streetscape on a rainy day. It portrays buildings and streets, and people walking about in the rain with umbrellas. The buildings are massive stone structures that dwarf the people. The brick streets are very wide, and it is a hike for people to cross them. The people in the midground and background of the painting are dressed like office workers – lower-middle class clerks and middle managers. They are small and seem fragile in contrast with the stolid concrete and brick surroundings. The people are mostly huddled within themselves, seemingly buried in their own thoughts and struggling against the nasty weather.
In contrast to these straggling citizens in the midground and background, there are three upper-class, well-dressed, almost life-sized figures in the lower right-hand foreground of the picture. Closest to us as we look at the picture is the back of a man in a black coat and top hat. Our vantage point on the painting is as though we are walking behind him, and as though we are about to step into the street with him. This man has an umbrella that he has tipped at a defensive angle. He has done this because he apparently sees that he is about to crash into a man and a woman who are walking towards him with an enormous umbrella of their own, and who seem oblivious to his existence.
These two people are in fancy dress clothes. They are seemingly of the haute bourgeoisie, the upper middle-class, and are correspondingly haughty in their attitude. With their noses smugly in the air, they are looking up and away from the man who is approaching them, looking at something we cannot see. Arrogant in their ignorance of the situation, they walk as though they seem to expect others will clear the way for them as they saunter down the street. They are wrong. A farcical collision is only seconds away.
Looking at the Painting: What you get is what you see.
There is an arc to the focus in “Paris: A Rainy Day.” When we look at the painting, our focus almost irresistibly goes first to the three foreground figures, the pompous man and woman and the poor man in their way. It then shifts to a man who is in the middle of the canvas and in the midground of the perspective. Like most of the people in the picture, this man is walking with his head down while crossing the street. He is bedraggled and seemingly self-absorbed, huddled in thought and within himself against the nasty weather. His attire and demeanor are in sharp contrast to the elegance and arrogance of the man and the woman. But he is only a way-station for our attention which then moves on to a pair of men crossing the street a short distance behind him on the left side of the painting.
This pair consists of a taller man who is closer to us and a shorter man who is half-hidden by his colleague. The taller man is looking forward and down, like most of the other bedraggled figures in the picture, and he is seemingly trying to concentrate on crossing the wet street. To this point, the painting seems to consist of haute-bourgeois fools and petti-bourgeois drudges. Nobody seems to care about or be aware of anybody else, except for the man in front of us who is about to crash into the oblivious man and woman.
But as you look at the two men on the left side of the painting, you can see that the shorter man is not just wrapped up in himself and his misery. He is looking at the three figures in the foreground and, seemingly, at us. He is observing the imminent collision, and he seems to be sharing with us a poignant and comical moment. He could even be winking at us. It is this shared moment between him and us that I think is a key to this picture.
History and the Painting: Social Order, Social Disorder, and Socialism.
Caillebotte lived a short but eventful and influential life. Born in Paris during the revolutionary year of 1848, he lived his early years in the midst of the reconstruction of the city by Baron Haussmann, Napolean III’s major domo. Paris had repeatedly been the center of mass revolutionary uprisings in 1789, 1830, and 1848, in which the lower classes barricaded the narrow, winding streets of the old city and thwarted the efforts of the army to put them down. One of Hausmann’s goals was to make Paris revolution-proof.
Toward this end, Haussmann engineered an enormous urban renewal project for Paris during the 1850’s and 1860’s in which wooden tenements for the poor were replaced by massive stone buildings for the rich, and the streets were straightened and widened to thwart blockading by lower class insurrectionists and facilitate military maneuvers by the armed forces. The success of this project was demonstrated when the French army put down the revolutionary working-class uprising known as the Paris Commune in 1871. The end products of Haussmann’s reconstruction are portrayed in “Paris: A Rainy Day” which features massive buildings and wide thoroughfares that he created.
Caillebotte was from a well-to-do family, and he became a lawyer and an engineer before being drafted to serve in the French army during the disastrous defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871. This defeat led to the revolutionary Paris Commune and its vicious repression by the armed forces – some 20,000 Communards executed in a week – that influenced many artists and writers of the late nineteenth century. It was not until after the Franco-Prussian War and the defeat of the Commune that Caillebotte turned to art as his career, and he became an early participant and promoter of the Impressionist Movement in painting.
Caillebotte was not only a leading Impressionist painter but also a great patron of other Impressionists. He was a wealthy man and he provided financial support to fledgling painters through buying and promoting their works. Pissarro, Monet, and Renoir, in particular, owed a great deal to his support, as to a lesser extent did Manet, Sisley, Cezanne, and Degas. Caillebotte was, in fact, much better known in his day for his patronage than for his paintings. He also had the bad fortune to die young, at the age of forty-five, which cut short his career and cut down on the likelihood of his works becoming well-known in his day.
As with many of the French Impressionist painters of this era, social class differences, working class life, and the foibles of the upper classes were featured in Caillebotte’s paintings. These interests scandalized the art establishment of that time. One of his first major works was “The Floor Scrapers,” a painting of shirtless workmen scraping a wooden floor which was rejected as vulgar by the authorities that controlled the art world. Many of the Impressionists identified with the working classes and scorned the upper classes. The smugness of the comfortably well-to-do galled them. “Epater la bourgeoisie,” or “Stick it to the well-to-do,” was a common sentiment among French artists and intellectuals at that time. I think this sentiment pervades “Paris: A Rainy Day.”
Viewing the Painting from Outside and Inside.
“Paris: A Rainy Day” is widely considered by commentators to be a dreary and even depressing picture. It is done in dark colors, mostly shades of grey, black and dark tan, that reflect the gloomy weather it portrays. It is also full of vast empty spaces that seem to reflect a void at the core of the universe. Most of the people in the picture are huddled into themselves, seemingly alienated from each other, using umbrellas that shield them from the rain but also from each other, just struggling to keep the wet and the chill at bay, and trying to make their way through the sterile canyons created by Haussmann’s urban renewal. Commentators often conclude that the painting is intended to promote a feeling of isolation and desolation.
But what about the immanent collision in the foreground? Many commentators don’t even mention the collision that is about to occur or, if they mention it, they don’t get the humor in it. To them, it is just part of the disorder and dismay of the scene. And almost no one seems to get the little guy in the background and he is, I think, the key to the picture: a silent communicator from the past to those of us viewing the painting in the present, a secret sharer in our delight that the two pompous bourgeois strollers are about to get their embarrassing due.
I don’t think “Paris: A Rainy Day” was intended to be a depressing painting, and isn’t to viewers who get past a cursory first glance and get into the picture. To the contrary, I think that it is a funny yet poignant painting, and that is one of the reasons for its popularity. The key is to complement an initial view of the painting from the outside with a view of the scene from the inside, and to connect with the little guy in the picture.
As I think is the case with most pictures, you can view “Paris: A Rainy Day” from an inside perspective as well as from the outside. The conventional view of the picture as a depressing downer makes sense if you are viewing it solely from the outside. The painting has a definitely dour aspect at a first glance, which is a glance from the outside.
But that aspect changes when you then look at it from the inside and see the story in the picture. Commentators who deem the picture dour must be viewing it solely from the outside, focusing on the aesthetics and missing the story. They are perhaps seeing the proverbial forest but missing the trees. And that is to miss much of what I think Caillebotte must have intended with this picture and much of what viewers can get from the picture.
Viewing the story in “Paris: A Rainy Day” requires you get past a merely passive appreciation of its aesthetics and get involved in the action. And I think that viewers who take a second glance at the picture are almost invariably drawn into the scene and see themselves as participants in the action. Standing right behind the colliding parties, and maybe close enough to the guy in front of us to become part of the collision, we almost can’t avoid imaginatively stepping into the picture. And once we have entered the painting, we can’t help seeing ourselves in silent communication with the little guy who is looking over at us and at the farcical collision that is about to take place. Sharing a moment of humor with him, we reach through time and space to share our common humanity.
BW 9/21
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