Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat (obverse: The Potato Peeler)
Vincent van Gogh
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The Story
Paris Street; Rainy Day (French: Rue de Paris, temps de pluie) is a large 1877 oil painting by the French artist Gustave Caillebotte, now at the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois. The work shows a Parisian street scene of pedestrians in rainy weather crossing a boulevard intersection in the present-day Place de Dublin, a square in the eighth arrondissement. It is the best known of Caillebotte's several cityscapes linked to Paris's reconstruction under Napoleon III and Georges-Eugène Haussmann in the mid-19th century.
Paris Street exemplifies the artist's views on modernity. Caillebotte made a number of preliminary sketches in graphite and oil. The composition shows 24 mostly bourgeois pedestrians, dominated by a foreground couple with an umbrella, who are staring outside of the viewer's field of vision. The painting takes the form of a photorealistic cityscape, departing from the typical style of Impressionist art, representative of a Paris that appears austere and hostile to human interaction.
The physical object — Oil on canvas, 212.2 × 276.2 cm (83 1/2 × 108 3/4 in.); Framed: 241.3 × 306.1 × 10.2 cm (95 × 120 1/2 × 4 in.) — carries its own history of handling and restoration. Gustave Caillebotte's brushwork here moves between exacting description and looser, more suggestive passages, a balance typical of 19th-century American studio practice.
Look closely and the painting opens up. Objects you might pass over — a folded letter, a half-drawn curtain, the angle of a glance — were placed to be read. The sitter is constructed: clothes, pose, and attributes were chosen to project status, virtue, and lineage.
Housed at Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, the painting has passed through the hands of collectors, dealers, and institutions before reaching public view — a provenance that is itself part of the object's story.
“A silence so complete it becomes its own witness.”
