Impressionism · 1877
Gustave Caillebotte 1848–1894
Art Institute of Chicago · Chicago
Parisians glide beneath umbrellas across rain-slicked cobbles — a vast, photographic vision of the city Haussmann had just rebuilt.
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Chapter 1 of 7
You are standing inside a rainy morning in 1877 Paris — a city still raw from Baron Haussmann's sweeping reconstruction. Gustave Caillebotte was thirty, wealthy enough to paint without selling, and obsessed with the modernity unfolding outside his window. What he showed at the third Impressionist exhibition stopped critics cold: not a garden, not a river, but an intersection, grey, immense, and utterly alive.
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