Not one raindrop is painted. The rain is in the shine on the cobbles, the closed coats and the umbrellas, and nowhere else on the canvas. Caillebotte showed it in April 1877 at the third Impressionist exhibition, where critics called it one of the outstanding things in the room.
A junction ten minutes from his flat
The crossing is in the eighth arrondissement of Paris, where the rue de Turin, the rue de Moscou, the rue Clapeyron and the rue de Saint-Petersbourg meet. It is called the Place de Dublin now. Caillebotte lived a short walk away, and almost everything he painted of the city is within walking distance of his own door.
Haussmann's rebuilding had gone through the quarter and the stone was still clean. Twenty-four people are in the picture, dressed for winter and for the class they belong to, and not one of them is looking at another one.
The couple walking straight at you in the foreground have seen something outside the frame, and they are not going to stop for it. You never find out what it was.
Ruled with a straightedge and a tack
Twenty-three studies survive, in pencil and in oil. The most worked-up drawing was sketched freehand in the street and then ruled up again in the studio with a straightedge and a compass, to get the perspective exact.
When conservators went over the finished painting they found small dents along the horizon where the vanishing points fall, and in infrared, pinholes. He pinned tacks into the canvas and pulled his lines off them, like a draughtsman rather than a painter.
The canvas is two metres high and nearly three wide, which is history-painting scale for a wet Tuesday. The green lamppost divides it, foreground on one side and distance on the other. Some critics thought the whole thing far too exact to be Impressionist at all.
Then it went into a family house for seventy years
After 1877 it was not shown in public again until a memorial exhibition in 1894, the year Caillebotte died. He left it to his younger brother Martial, and it stayed with the family, in houses rather than galleries, for the better part of a century.
He had spent his inheritance buying his friends' paintings and paying for their exhibitions, and his own work slid quietly out of the story. The Art Institute of Chicago bought it in 1964, and his reputation starts coming back at about that date.
A layer of varnish put on in the early 1900s had decayed badly by the time anyone examined it properly. Among the things it had trapped were fingerprints. The canvas was cleaned in 1964 and gone over again after a show in 2012, with X-ray, infrared and ultraviolet.
A picture of a downpour with no rain in it, and seventy years in a family's house. The umbrellas are back out.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.