About Paris Street; Rainy Day
Gustave Caillebotte painted Paris Street; Rainy Day in 1877, when the center of Paris had just been rebuilt with wide boulevards and uniform stone apartment buildings. The scene is a real crossroads near the Gare Saint-Lazare. Well-dressed passers-by walk under umbrellas across the wet paving stones, and a fashionable couple strolls toward us on the right.
Caillebotte was a friend and patron of the Impressionists, and he exhibited this painting at their third exhibition in 1877. His style, though, is sharper and more precise than theirs. A green lamppost splits the canvas in two, and the figures are cut off at the edges as in a photograph, giving the picture its modern, almost cinematic feel.
The canvas is very large, more than two meters high and nearly three meters wide, so the figures in front are close to life size. It belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago.
Tips for this puzzle
The grey sky and the paving stones are the hard part. Begin with the lamppost and the umbrellas, then the pale building at the point of the street. The lines of the paving help to place the lower pieces.
Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877. The Art Institute of Chicago. Public domain (CC0); image: www.artic.edu. Image source. All image credits
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