Paris Street; Rainy Day

Begin with the man who is only half there. At the right edge of the canvas a figure in a dark coat has been sliced in two by the frame, his umbrella cocked toward the couple walking in. Another step and the ribs will catch. Gustave Caillebotte has painted the instant before two strangers on a Paris pavement perform the small, awkward dance of getting out of each other’s way.

The couple do not see it coming. They are looking off to our left at something we will never be shown. He wears a top hat and a careful moustache; she has a veil, a pearl at her ear, a coat trimmed in fur, and her hand rests in the crook of his arm. Their umbrella is the newest kind, the retractable sort that had just come on the market, and it shelters them like the roof of a very small house.

Behind them the city opens with a draughtsman’s confidence. A wedge-shaped apartment block parts two streets like the prow of a ship. Pale façades, uniform windows, roofs of slate: this is Haussmann’s Paris, a district laid out on open ground within living memory, and the intersection lay a short walk from Caillebotte’s family home. He painted it in 1877 at nearly life size, more than two metres high, and showed it that year at the Impressionists’ third exhibition. A green lamppost splits the picture down the middle, as firm as a ruled line.

What holds me is the wet. Rain is never drawn here; it is only reported, in the sheen on the paving stones and the grey light pooled between them. Each cobble is a separate, slightly shining loaf. You can almost feel the cold coming up through thin city shoes.

Caillebotte had money, and he spent a great deal of it on his friends’ pictures when they were hard to sell. In 1876 he wrote a will leaving that collection to the French state. When he died in 1894, officials hesitated, negotiated, and in the end accepted only thirty-eight of the works. Those thirty-eight are now among the treasures of the Musée d’Orsay.

His own painting crossed an ocean instead. In Chicago, the man at the edge is still about to bump into somebody, and has been for a hundred and forty-nine years.