The record behind the sheet in your tube: the file we worked from, what we measured, what we chose and why, what we are allowed to sell, and the framing dimensions for this sheet.
Framing this sheet
- 50 × 40 cm sheet
- A 50 × 40 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 20 × 16 in. Margins 4.00 cm each side, 3.44 cm above, 3.95 cm below.
- 100 × 75 cm sheet
- A 100 × 75 cm frame. Nearest standard 40 × 30 in. Margins 8.00 cm each side, 4.55 cm above, 5.22 cm below.
- If you mat it
- Go one frame size up and cut the window three millimetres inside the printed image on every side: 41.40 × 32.01 cm for the small sheet, 83.40 × 64.63 cm for the large one. Off-white or warm white board, acid-free. Do not trim the sheet.
The sheet you have
- Work
- Gustave Caillebotte (French, 1848–1894), Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877
- Object
- Oil on canvas, 212.2 × 276.2 cm. Inscribed lower left: G. Caillebotte. 1877
- Held by
- Art Institute of Chicago, Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection
- Inventory
- 1964.336
- Rights
- CC0 — the museum places both the work and its photograph in the public domain
- File
- Art Institute of Chicago, at high resolution, taken directly from the institution and not from an aggregator
- Crop
- None. The paint runs to all four borders of the museum's file; we print the file whole.
The picture Caillebotte made
A crossroads in the new Paris, a short walk from Caillebotte's own house, on a wet afternoon. The apartment blocks are the ones Haussmann's rebuilding had just put up, cut to a wedge where the streets meet. A green gas lamp stands in the middle of the canvas and splits it in two. On the right a couple walk under one umbrella straight towards us, both glancing at something outside the frame. Everyone else is going about their business at a distance.
There are no raindrops. As the Art Institute points out, the weather is in the umbrellas, the new retractable kind, and in the reflections on the cobbles. At a time when painters rarely tried to show people in motion, Caillebotte placed each figure in the background to give the feeling of a busy street.
Number one in April 1877
Caillebotte was twenty-eight, a painter and also the Impressionists' most generous backer. He showed this canvas at the third Impressionist exhibition, at 6 rue le Peletier in April 1877, and it was number one in the catalogue, listed as Rue de Paris; Temps de pluie. It is his largest and most ambitious painting. The Art Institute acquired it in 1964, long before his place in the movement was widely recognised, and it has been a visitor favourite ever since.
The Stacks of Wheat in this catalogue had the same start: number one at the Monet exhibition of 1891.
Why 0.30× is the right size
The canvas is 2.76 metres wide. Nobody hangs that at home, and no museum file would carry it: this one is 9,987 × 7,755 px, which at original size is 36.16 px/cm, or 92 dpi. So there is no 1:1 sheet. What the file does carry, at our floor of 300 dpi, is 84.56 cm of width. Our house rule puts the image at 84 % of a 100 cm sheet, 84.00 cm, so the large sheet prints at 302 dpi. That is 0.30× the canvas.
The 50 × 40 cm sheet prints the picture 42.00 cm wide — 0.15× original, with 604 dpi available. It is small for a picture built for a wall, and we would rather say that than hide it. Pick the small sheet for the detail you can hold close, and the large one for the street.
One wrinkle in the measurement: the file's ratio is 1.2878, the catalogued dimensions give 1.3016, which is 1.06 % apart. Anchored on the width, the photograph shows 214.5 cm of height against the catalogued 212.2. The likeliest explanation is that the photograph takes in a strip of canvas edge beyond the catalogued size, but that is a supposition, not a measurement, and we do not squeeze the file to fit the number.
What we measured at the edges
Forty samples along each border, at the outermost pixel row and again eight pixels in. Medians: top 142 and 150, bottom 96 and 100, left 110 and 102, right 54 and 51, and every border ranges widely from sample to sample — the pale sky at the top, the cobbles at the bottom, the dark green shopfront along the right edge. That is paint, not a photographer's backdrop. Nothing is cut away.
What we are allowed to sell
Caillebotte died on 21 February 1894. The painting has been in the public domain in Switzerland, the EU and the United Kingdom since 1965, and in the United States since long before, as a work exhibited in 1877. The Art Institute of Chicago publishes the object under CC0 and serves the full-resolution file openly through its IIIF endpoint. Markets checked: Switzerland, the EU, the United Kingdom, the United States. Clear in all four.
A note on colour
Measured from the museum file, downsampled to 240 × 186 px: 80.3 % of the pixels carry colour, and within that blue accounts for 48.3 %, warm tones 44.1 %, violet 4.0 %, green 3.7 %. The grey-blue of the rain dominates the saturated pixels (80.3 % blue at a threshold of 0.25), but at our house threshold the picture stays below the 60 % we require for the Blue collection. A grey day, measured honestly.