Paris Street; Rainy Day

Well-dressed Parisians cross a vast cobbled intersection under umbrellas in the grey drizzle, a couple looming large at the right while the wide, wedge-shaped boulevards of Haussmann's new city recede behind. Gustave Caillebotte composes the scene with bold, almost photographic perspective and crisp, cool precision, far tighter than his Impressionist friends. Now in the Art Institute of Chicago, Paris Street, Rainy Day is the great image of the modern remade capital - its grand new avenues, its anonymous strollers, and the cool, slightly melancholy mood of bourgeois life in the rebuilt nineteenth-century metropolis.