Paris, A Rainy Day
Project
Gustave Caillebotte
Volunteer:
Date:
Grade Level: 3rd Grade
Artist: Gustave Caillebotte
Print/Sculpture: Paris, A Rainy Day
Art Vocabulary:
I. The Artist
Gustave Caillebotte was born in 1848 to a wealthy family who had made their money in textiles and real estate during the redevelopment of Paris in the 1860s.
In 1875, wishing to make his public debut, he submitted a painting to the Salon jury, which rejected it. that work was probably the Floorscrapers which Caillebotte then decided to exhibit in a more hospitable environment, that of the second Impressionist group exhibition of 1876. His work, highly acclaimed, stole the show and helped to make the second exhibition far more of a popular success than the first.
Wealthy and generous, Caillebotte financially supported his Impressionist friends by purchasing their works at inflated prices and underwriting many of the expenses incurred for the exhibitions. Caillebotte was a painter of great originality. Like the Impressionists, Caillebotte pursued an instant of vision, recording it with a fullness of truthful detail. Caillebotte, however, attempted to portray the rhythms of an industrial society with his regimented figures and the clock-like precision of his Paris. In this aspect, he was very much like the Realists.
In 1876 he drew up a will providing money for an Impressionist exhibition to be held after his death, and bequeathing his collection of Impressionist paintings to the State. This bequest was made on the condition that the paintings should first be exhibited in the Luxembourg (the museum dedicated to the work of living artists), and later to the Lourve. He intended that the State should not hide the paintings away in an attic or provincial museum. His brother Martial along with Renoir were entrusted with making sure the provisions of his will were carried out. Gustave Caillebotteb died in 1894.
II. The Painting:  Paris, A Rainy Day
What do you see in the picture?
When does the scene take place? It takes place a hundred years ago. You can tell that by looking at the clothes of the pedestrians in the street (long dresses or skirts of the ladies, top hats or bowlers of the men) and by looking at the cityscape around them (no automobiles anywhere by cobblestoned streets; the lamp post is also something of a different age; it looks very much like the ones which we still have in Riverside and which the people of our village are trying so hard to conserve as a vestige of the past).
How do you know it is raining? Glistening stones, etc.
What kind of title would you give this picture? Gustave Caillebotte called it: Paris, a Rainy Day
What kind of evidence do you have that it is raining? The umbrellas, the wet, glistening pavement. But it is a light rain. Typical of Parisian weather in the fall or the spring. It is not enough of a rain to hinder people. The couple in the foreground, for example, are strolling along. Neither the man nor the woman are in a hurry to find a shelter from the rain. It does not seem to be a cold day at all.
Emphasize the hugeness of the original picture at The Art Institute. Measure how big it would look on the wall of the classroom. In the original picture, the couple in the foreground actually look bigger than life-size (The pictue is 83 1/2 x 108 3/4")
Do you feel that you are excluded from the picture or do you feel that you are invited to come into it?
You might be the person on the right of the picture, the one who is about to bump into the man and woman who are strolling down the sidewalk! Maybe the question is not whether you are invited to step into the world of the picture, but whether it feels as though the people in the picture are about to invade your own space outside of the picture. Overall, the painting creates an unsettling impression. we are torn between being pulled in and being pushed out.
How does the artist create his unsettling impression in us? The artist has actually divided his picture into two different parts.
How did he divide the picture? He planted a lamp post right in the middle of the painting.
On the right side of the painting, the sidewalk and the pedestrian are so close to us that they seem to pull us inside their space.
On the left side of the painting, the street, buildings and anonymous figures appear so far in the distance that they seem to pull us out.
The artist is playing tricks with perspective. On the left side, he makes his perspective lines recede into the distance faster than they normally do in a painting. On the right side, he makes all the lines come forward, faster than they normally do in a painting.
Try to figure out where the horizon would be if all the lines were lengthened.
Show a picture taken with a fish-eye lens.
It would reveal the same kind of distortion that is created by Caillebotte here, in an even more dramatic way: The objects in the middle of the photograph would seem to recede far away while the objects on the sides would be brought closer to us. Caillebotte is trying to make the street look very big, just as the photographer who uses a fish-eye lens attempts to take in a much wider view.
What devices did Caillebotte use to make the street appear very wide? In the foreground, there is a large expanse of street without anything or anybody it.
Certain objects in the painting are made bigger than is realistic. The lamp post is made taller by its reflection in the wet pavement. Compared to the size of the pedestrians who work next to it, it also appears much taller than is normal. The cobblestones in the foreground are also huge compared to normal cobblestones.
Introduce the notion of proportions with the help of some hands-on materials. For example, by placing little Russian dolls that can be inserted into one another next to other objects. It is possible to demonstrate the notion of relative proportion.
Why would Caillebotte make the street appear very wide? He was probably proud of the grandiose construction that were going on in Paris. His painting was a way to celebrate the beautification of the French capital [Paris] which had been undertaken during the second half of the nineteenth century by Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann (1809-1891). Modern boulevards, wide and straight, were built to replace dark and narrow streets. Many public buildings were also constructed at that time and public parks, such as the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes, which were being developed.
Show pictures of the Architectual achievements of Baron Haussmann. The Paris that was rebuilt in the second half of the nineteenth century is the city that fascinated the architect Daniel Burnham who was responsible for the urban replanning of Chicago after the great fire of 1871. Burnham admired the stately boulevards and star-shaped public squares of Paris and designed a similarly grandiose plan to rebuild Chicago. One of his best-known remarks was: "Make no little plans: They have no magic to sir men's blood and themselves will not be realized."
What kinds of lines and geometrical shapes do you see in the picture? Many straight lines, vertical (lamp post, buildings' plumb lines, sidewalk curb, umbrella stems), horizontal (cobblestones). The straight vertical lines are emphasis on the right. The straight horizontal lines are emphasis on the left.
Rectangles (cobblestones; Triangles (buildings); Curves (umbrella tops, people's shapes and clothes).
What kinds of colors do you see? Mostly blacks and grays. The beautiful gold earrings of the lady in the foreground shine in all this grayness. The painting is a symphony in grays. It shows a great deal of mixing of colors, with no large area of any one color.
Notice how beautifully the glistening wetness of the pavement is rendered.
Perspective: Allows a picture to appear 3 dimensional, no flat (2 dimensional).
See additional Perspective Information.
Horizon Line: Where land meets sky; taller, distant always at eye level.
Eye Level: The horizon will always be level with your eyes. It coincides with your eye level. A tall person will see a more distant horizon than a short person. If a person were to stand on a cliff, he would see a more distant horizon.
Vanishing Point: Where horizon lines parallel to each other appear to converge in the horizon. It's where parallel lines appear to meet.
Ground Plane: Imagine that you are standing on the ground and that the piece of ground that you are standing on is part of a big, flat plane that is flat as far away as you can see. This flat plane is known as the ground plane.
Forced Perspective: In force perspective, parallel lines converge much more rapidly than observed in a normal situation. It has the effect of pulling your eyes forward or backward into the picture. It is disturbing to your eyes and brain.
Look again at Paris, A Rainy Day.
Foreground is open.
Lamp Post is taller than man next to it.
Cobblestones are huge in front.
Possible Activities connected with the Painting: Print out Perspective Projects and have the children cut them out and place them in different combinations to see what "feels" right.
Exercise: If you were standing on a flat, open field, or on the shoreline of an ocean or Lake Michigan, and if you were to hold a pencil horizontally in your hand with your arm stretched out in front of you and above the level of your head, then slowly brought the pencil down until it were level with the horizon (where the sky meets the land or sea), you would find that the pencil would be level with your eyes.
Draw a picture of a rainy day in the streets of Chicago or Riverside.

Harmony in grays: Make a drawing with only black, gray and white.
Exercise in Perspective: Ask the children to draw an object under two or three different angles. Example: A model of the Sears tower or the Eiffel Tower seen from above, below, frontally and sideways; or an umbrella seen from above, below or frontally.
We placed umbrellas around the room in various positions (upside down, on their side, right side up) and asked the children to draw them from different angles – as seen from above, below, front. We used oil pastels and construction paper and gave the children the option to work with mixing oil with the oil pastels.
Additional information available on Gustave Caillebott at this link.