Caillebotte's ambitious modem history painting Paris Street; Rainy Day, much like his Floor-Scrapers,
shown the previous year, secured the artist critical appreciation
at the Impressionist exhibition in 1877 for its "science of design
and arrangement. "According to one reviewer, it was a canvas "that,
despite the bizarre quality of some of its details and its jerky
handling ... would still figure honorably beside pictures receiving
the approval of the Champs-Elysees (official Salon) jury." Indeed,
in the relative finish of its brushwork, in the well studied
rationality of its composition, and especially in its impressive
size, Paris Street--despite the shocking modernity of its
subject-must have looked familiarly academic in 1877, betraying
Caillebotte's recent study with the Salon artist Leon Bonnat.
It even prompted one critic to exclaim that "M. Caillebotte is
an Impressionist in name only," because in comparison to many of
his colleagues who were being derided for daring to exhibit
sketches as finished works of art, this painting demonstrated
that Caillebotte "knows how to draw and paint more
seriously. . . ."The fact that Caillebotte followed an academic
rather than "Impressionist" method in many of the large paintings
of his early career is evidenced by a group of preparatory drawings
and oil sketches for Paris Street, through which the artist
developed and altered his original conception for the picture.
These studies and sketches certainly attest to the 'considerable
effort' described by the critic Georges Riviere in 1877 in
reference to the painting, and "how difficult it was and how
much skill was necessary to complete a canvas of these dimensions." Nevertheless, they also demonstrate the lengths to which the
artist went in order to construct an image that would appear at
once both obsessively ordered and precariously fragile-a
construction that constitutes the very basis of the picture's
meaning.
