The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Gustave Caillebotte · Rue de Paris, temps de pluie · an oil painting on canvas, wider than high, about 212 by 276 cm · a Paris crossroads in light rain, a couple under one umbrella walking toward the viewer at near life size · painted 1877, shown at the third Impressionist exhibition · The Art Institute of Chicago · the single canvas, scored as it stands
Mode
The painting of modern life at the size of history painting, with near academic finish; a street picture built as a geometry of the city
Mythos
The modern city as myth: the crowd of strangers, the passer-by met and lost, the encounter refused, half built in the umbrellas and otherwise evoked
Phase
Painted 1877 and shown that April at the third Impressionist exhibition in Paris; in the Art Institute of Chicago since 1964
Presentation
One canvas, wider than high, about 212 by 276 cm, the figures at the right near life size, the lamppost about on the vertical centre line
Register
Cool and composed: grey, ochre and black, the wet cobbles silvered, the green of the post, no warmth to speak of, held at one temperature
Scale
One crossroads, one instant, one class, one weather
Governing Proposition
A cobbled crossroads of the new Paris lies wet and grey under light rain; a green lamppost stands near the middle and divides the canvas from top to bottom. At the right, near life size, a well-dressed couple walks toward the viewer under one umbrella, and a stranger cut by the frame is about to pass them, his umbrella all but touching theirs. To the left of the post the square opens into deep recession, its scattered walkers each alone under an umbrella, every head at one height. The wager of the canvas is that the painting of modern life can be carried at the size of history painting and with near academic exactness, and that its geometry, the post that divides, the level heads, the umbrellas that nearly meet, can show what the rebuilt city does to the people it orders: it puts them closer together and further apart at once.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Gustave Caillebotte painted the canvas in 1877. Its title is Rue de Paris, temps de pluie, in English Paris Street; Rainy Day. It is oil on canvas, about 212 by 276 cm, wider than high by about 1.30 to 1, and it hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago, in the Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection, acquired in 1964. The work scored here is that one canvas, as it stands. The preparatory drawings, the smaller oil sketch, the painter’s other street pictures of 1876 and 1877, Le Pont de l’Europe above all, and The Floor Scrapers of 1875 are context and are not scored.
The place is a real one: the junction then called the Carrefour de Moscou, now the place de Dublin, in the eighth arrondissement near the Gare Saint-Lazare, where the rue de Turin, the rue de Moscou and the rue de Saint-Pétersbourg meet. It is a quarter of the rebuilt Paris, its apartment blocks of Haussmann’s era, one of them a wedge whose narrow prow faces the viewer at the centre. The square is cobbled, wet and grey in a light rain, and scattered walkers cross it under umbrellas.
The canvas was shown in April 1877 at the third Impressionist exhibition in Paris, among pictures of broken touch and small size. It then stayed with the painter’s family for most of the next nine decades and was little seen until it came to Chicago. The painter’s own recovery dates from the 1970s. The picture that is now the image by which he is known spent most of its life out of sight.
Movement II
A green lamppost stands near the middle of the canvas and runs from top to bottom. It divides the field into two pictures. To its right, near life size, a couple walks toward the viewer under one umbrella; to its left the square opens away into deep recession, its walkers small, its lines running to the prow of the wedge building at the far end. The split is the subject: a near world and a far one, held in one frame and kept apart by a post the city put there.
The horizon is low, and the heads of near and far walkers fall at about one height. The couple at the right and the tiny figures across the square are measured to the same line, so that every walker, rich or small, becomes an equal unit in one perspective. The perspective itself is built with an architect’s control across a deep, wide field, and stretched toward the edges, so that the space bends as a wide lens bends and the square seems to pull away as the couple come forward.
Every element of that architecture bears load. Take away the post and the two worlds run together; take away the couple and the viewer loses a place on the pavement; take away the prow and the recession has nowhere to go. What yields is the population of the middle distance, a walker more or less on the square, a carriage, a window, and the perspective still stands. The scale is compelled. The canvas is necessary in its architecture and permitted in its middle ground.
Movement III
The man of the couple wears a top hat and an overcoat; the woman is veiled, with a fur-trimmed collar. At the right edge a third figure is cut by the frame, and his umbrella is about to meet theirs. The couple and the stranger pass within a hand’s breadth of each other and do not look at one another, each enclosed under a dome of cloth, and the rim of an umbrella is all that keeps them apart. That near collision is the event of the canvas, and it does not happen.
What the picture brings into the open can be stated: the new city puts people closer together and further apart at once. The walkers in the square are spaced like pieces on a board, each alone under an umbrella. The streets are straight, the façades alike, the paving level; the post divides. The rebuilt Paris is shown as a system that orders its citizens, and the class it serves is shown too, prosperous, dressed, at leisure in its own quarter, with no labour visible near the front. The canvas discloses this without stating it, through its structure and not through its subject.
The disclosure is real and narrow. Anonymity and order are given as a cool atmosphere, sensed more than argued; how much of the alienation later critics have found is in the canvas, and how much brought to it, remains a question. The myth of the modern city, the crowd of strangers, the passer-by met and lost, the flâneur’s Paris, is evoked by the subject more than built, with one exception: the encounter refused, which the umbrellas make into a figure. Beyond that the canvas keeps to its particulars, a known junction, a date, a weather, a fashion.
Movement IV
The palette is grey, ochre and black, with the green of the post. The grey is a unity held across nearly six square metres and modulated from the silvered sky through the façades to the paving. The wet cobbles are the one place where the rain is visible: each stone is separately lit and given its own glint, and the passage is among the finest painting of wet ground in the century. The couple are painted with authority, the dark wool, the fur, the veil, the ribs of the umbrella.
The making has its costs, and they are charged. The far figures are summary, doll-like to some eyes. The perspective stretches at the edges. The faces of the couple are given less life than their clothes. The finish, though, is the point: a broken touch would dissolve the cool, exact surface that makes the order felt, and a smaller canvas would lose the couple’s arrival at life size. The form is the knowledge here, and the painter’s Le Pont de l’Europe carries the same knowledge in another key.
The elevation is of one cool kind. It comes in the sudden depth of the square to the left of the post, in the sheen of the cobbles, and in the couple who arrive out of the rain at the viewer’s own size; there is a quiet grandeur in the emptiness and the spacing. The canvas refuses transport by design. One law governs it, from the couple in the foreground to the walker at the far end of the square, every figure a unit in one perspective, one light and one weather; and the law holds over one instant, one class and one key.
Movement V
The turn the canvas made is real. It joins the finish and perspective of the École and the Salon to the modern-life subject of the Impressionists, whose exhibitions the painter joined and paid for, and it hangs the result, at the size of history painting, in their own exhibition. Its composition, the split field, the figure cut by the frame, the jump in scale from near to far, is kin to the photograph and the Japanese print. The stake was cushioned: the painter was rich, and The Floor Scrapers had already been refused. The risk was of standing in neither camp, too finished for the Impressionists, too modern for the Salon.
In its decade the canvas redirected little. The painter was eclipsed, his own painting left the Paris street within a few years, and the picture spent most of a century in private hands. Its reach came late and is largely presence, the image by which the painter is known and an emblem of the century’s Paris, widely reproduced. Its yield is short and active: questions of optical devices and photographs, of whether it celebrates or exposes the rebuilt city, of how the couple and the gaze are to be read. After about a century and a half the canvas is whole, and since the 1970s continuously on view.
The desk sets it a tenth below Degas’s L’Absinthe at 8.2, the same years’ picture of two people placed apart in a public room; two tenths below Hopper’s Nighthawks at 8.3, another city of strangers held apart by geometry, whose figures are given an interior and a night where these are given only spacing; below Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie at 8.4, another city made a geometry; well below Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère at 8.7, a modern-life picture of the following decade that outscores it on every axis; and above Fragonard’s The Swing at 7.8. The couple walk on toward the viewer, the stranger’s umbrella a hair from theirs, and the square opens away behind the post.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test, element by element. The lamppost cannot go: it splits the canvas into two pictures, the near couple and the open square, and the split is the subject. The couple cannot go, nor the cut figure at the right edge whose umbrella is about to graze theirs; that near collision is the event. The wet cobbles cannot go, since their sheen alone carries the light and the rain. The prow of the wedge building cannot go: the recession runs to it. The scale is compelled, so that the viewer becomes one more walker. What yields is the population of the middle distance: a walker more or less, a carriage, a window. Necessary in its architecture, permitted in its middle ground.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Something can be stated, and it holds: the new city puts people closer together and further apart at once. The couple and the stranger pass within a hand’s breadth and do not look at one another; the walkers in the square are spaced like pieces on a board, each alone under an umbrella, every head at one height. Rebuilt Paris is shown as a system that orders its citizens, in straight streets, matching façades, a post that divides and paving that levels; and the class it serves is shown, dressed and at leisure, with no labour near the front. Held below the gate because the condition is sensed more than argued, given as a cool atmosphere, and narrow: one class, one quarter, one weather.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Elevation is present in one cool register, and not often. It comes in the sudden depth of the square to the left of the post, a breadth of grey space opening toward the prow of the wedge building, rare in a street picture; in the sheen of the cobbles, each stone separately lit, a passage of real beauty; and in the couple, who arrive out of the rain at the viewer’s own size. There is a quiet grandeur in the emptiness and the spacing. What holds the axis here is the register the canvas chooses: grey, ochre and black, composed and urban, with no terror and almost no warmth. Its effect is fascination more than height: one sustained temperature, well held, rising little.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Mostly evoked, and partly brought by its readers. The patterns are those of the modern city as myth: the crowd of strangers, the passer-by met and lost, the bourgeois couple as the emblem of a class, the flâneur’s Paris. The picture builds one structure of its own: the meeting of strangers that does not happen, each enclosed under a dome of cloth, the city as a place of near contact without encounter. That comes close to an archetype, the encounter refused, and the umbrella makes it a figure. Elsewhere the deeper patterns are absent: no story, no sacred, no origin and no fall. The particulars stay wholly particular, a known junction, a date, a weather, a fashion, which is a strength of the canvas and its limit here.
Score: 7.0 / 10
The inheritance is double: the finish and perspective of the École and the Salon, and the modern-life subject of the Impressionists, whose exhibitions the painter joined and paid for. The turn joins them where neither was meant to go: everyday Paris painted at the size of history painting, with near academic finish, and hung in the Impressionists’ own exhibition among broken touch and small canvases. The composition turns too: the post splitting the field, the figure cut by the frame, the steep, wide recession, the abrupt jump in scale from near to far, devices kin to the photograph and the Japanese print and pressed further than any Salon picture pressed them. The stake was real but cushioned by the painter’s wealth: the risk of standing in neither camp. Turn strong, stake moderate.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Substitute another form and much goes. What the canvas knows, closeness without contact in an ordered city, lives in its geometry: the post that splits the field into two unequal worlds, the level heads that make every walker an equal unit, the perspective that pulls the square away as the couple come forward. A smaller canvas loses the couple’s arrival at life size, and with it the viewer’s place on the pavement. A broken Impressionist touch would dissolve the cool, exact surface that makes the order felt: the finish is the system. The unity of grey is chosen, not given. Held below the top because the same knowledge is carried, in another key, by the painter’s Le Pont de l’Europe, and some of it would survive a large print with loss rather than collapse.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Evidence over promise, and the evidence is short. The canvas was little seen for most of its first ninety years, so its demonstrated yield runs to about sixty years, most of it in the last fifty, since the painter’s recovery in the 1970s. The questions are real and remain open: how far the perspective was built with optical devices or photographs, and how far its distortions are meant; whether the picture celebrates the rebuilt Paris or exposes it; whether the couple are a portrait of a class, an image of intimacy or a study in coldness; what the painter’s own place in the quarter brings to it; how the gaze runs between the couple and the viewer. Held where it is because the readings turn largely on one axis, the modern city.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The field is French painting of the late 1870s and the painting of modern life. Intrinsic force is real: the canvas shows that the Impressionist subject could be carried at monumental size and with academic exactness, and its cropping and split field anticipate devices of later photography and painting; it is among the strongest single statements of Haussmann’s Paris in paint. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its decade it redirected little, since the painter was eclipsed, left the Paris street within a few years, and the canvas spent most of a century in private hands. Its later reach is largely of another kind, as the image by which the painter is known and an emblem of the century’s Paris, which is presence, not pressure. No documented line of descent is claimed.
Score: 7.6 / 10
About a century and a half, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole; the image is the image the painter made, and nothing that carries its meaning is lost. Presence: charged. Shown in 1877, the canvas stayed with the family and was little seen for most of the next ninety years; it entered a public collection only in 1964, and its standing dates from the painter’s recovery in the 1970s. Since then it has been continuously on view and among the best known pictures in its museum. Wide reproduction earns a tenth at most, and that tenth is withheld for the long obscurity. Fabric is not charged. Its surface is fixed to 1877 and has outlived that moment, as documents do.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged as command of oil at the scale of history painting, and the making is load-bearing. The perspective is constructed with an architect’s control across a deep, wide field, its lines running to the prow of the wedge building. The grey is a unity held across nearly six square metres, modulated from the silvered sky through the façades to the wet cobbles, each stone given its own glint, among the finest passages of wet ground in the century’s painting. The couple are painted with authority: the dark wool, the fur, the veil, the umbrella’s ribs. The costs are charged: the far figures are summary, doll-like to some eyes; the perspective stretches toward the edges as a wide lens bends; and the couple’s faces are given less life than their clothes.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the near couple at life size, rich in material and colour, and the tiny walker at the far end of the square, a few strokes of grey. One law holds them: every figure is a unit in one perspective, one light and one weather, the heads on one line, each walker alone under an umbrella, the grey falling equally on the rich and the small. The post, the façades, the paving and the people obey the same geometry and the same cool tonality; nothing breaks the order, and the rain enters every surface. The range runs from intimate foreground to deep architectural space, from fabric to stone to sky. Held below the top because the law governs one instant, one class and one key, and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The orders held: the city as built order, its planning shown as a structure that arranges people; class, in the dress, the quarter and the leisure of the walkers; the couple, as a social unit; consciousness, in the averted gazes and the private enclosure under each umbrella; the weather and the light, the natural order brought into the street. The geometry integrates them; they are placed, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: labour at most at the far edges, the state present only in its streets, history only as the new city, the sacred not at all, and no event. It is a large canvas of one moment in one quarter, and the mark describes the form.
Score: 6.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.7 and The Living Form at 8.5. A canvas whole in form after about a century and a half, continuously on view since the 1970s; a grey unity held across nearly six square metres, with wet cobbles each separately lit and a perspective built with an architect’s control; one law of perspective, light and weather governing the couple and the farthest walker alike; and a form in which the knowledge lives in the geometry, the post that divides, the level heads, the umbrellas that nearly meet.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.9: the city as built order, class, the couple, consciousness and the weather, placed in one geometry, with labour at the edges, the state only in its streets, no sacred and no event. Then The Archetypal Deep at 7.0: the modern city’s myths evoked by the subject, with one figure built, the encounter refused. Then The Sublime at 7.3: one cool register, rising in the depth of the square and the sheen of the cobbles and refusing transport. Then Pressure on Tradition at 7.6: real force, little redirected in its decade, and a late reach that is mostly presence.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 9.0 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.2, The Swerve at 8.3, Pressure on Tradition at 7.6 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.0 fall short of it, the disclosure sensed more than argued and narrow, the stake cushioned, the reach late and mostly presence, the myth evoked and built only in the umbrellas. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.3, and The Archetypal Deep, 7.0, both below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.9. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 96.6, an average of 8.05 that displays 8.1, in Tier IV, a tenth above the 8.0 at which it begins and short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the canvas: well as an image, its composition, scale, palette, the post, the couple, the cut figure and the cobbles; moderately on its exhibition and ownership history; thinly on the criticism of 1877, which is not quoted. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the single canvas as it stands: Gustave Caillebotte, Rue de Paris, temps de pluie (Paris Street; Rainy Day), oil on canvas, 1877, about 212 by 276 cm, The Art Institute of Chicago, Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection, acquired 1964. The proportion, about 1.30 to 1, follows from the dimensions; the placing of the post on the centre line and the level of the heads are judged from the image, not measured. The preparatory drawings, the smaller oil sketch, Le Pont de l’Europe, the other street pictures of 1876 and 1877 and The Floor Scrapers are context. Only the title is quoted. The brush and layer structure and the extent of later conservation are not known and are not stated. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the exact dimensions, the whereabouts of the oil sketch, the woman’s earring, whether the canvas was the painter’s largest entry in 1877, the retrospective that marked his recovery, the condition and conservation history of the surface, and the identity of the distant figures. Whether the perspective was built with optical devices or photographs is stated as an open question; no line of influence on later painters is claimed.