Paris Street; Rainy Day, pinned and ruled

You are Gustave Caillebotte, born in Paris in 1848. Your father made a fortune supplying beds to the army, sat as a judge of the commercial court, and built the family a house at 77 rue de Miromesnil with an artist's studio under the roof. Summers are spent at the family estate at Yerres.

You took a law degree in 1870 and served in the Garde mobile in the war with Prussia. Soon after, you entered the studio of the painter Léon Bonnat, and in March 1873 you passed the entrance examination of the École des Beaux-Arts, 46th on the list. The École's records show no competitions entered: you hardly attended.

Your father died at Christmas 1874 and left you rich. In 1875 the Salon jury refused your Floor Scrapers, and in 1876 you showed it with the Impressionists instead. That November your brother René died. Two days later you wrote a will leaving your collection of your friends' paintings to the State, and money for an Impressionist exhibition in 1878.

Ten minutes' walk from your house, in the quartier de l'Europe, where the streets are named after European cities, the rues de Turin, de Moscou and de Saint-Pétersbourg cross in an open, shapeless space, and the rue Clapeyron sets off from it. It is known as the carrefour de la rue de Moscou; it became the place de Dublin only in 1987. Private developers laid the quarter out from 1826, and its last buildings were still going up in your youth, as the rue de Turin was extended and the rue Clapeyron cut through.

You pass it on your way to the cafés. Stand on the pavement of the rue de Turin, near the curb, and look across: the rue de Moscou goes off to the left, the rue Clapeyron straight ahead behind a lamp post, and between them rises a new wedge of apartments with a pharmacy at its point.

In 1876 you painted the Pont de l'Europe, a few hundred metres away, over the tracks into the Gare Saint-Lazare. Before settling on this crossing you had also drawn one at the rue de Madrid, and dropped it.

An ordinary corner

No monument, and a title that means only “a Paris street”.

Life size

Figures as large as the people looking at them, on a canvas nearly three metres wide.

Leave things out

No shop windows, kiosks or advertising columns, as the Art Institute notes; one lamp post in the middle.

Make the first drawing at the corner itself, in soft pencil on half a sheet of tan laid paper. Put in the buildings and the lamp post; mark where the passers-by will go with zigzags, and the couple with a single oversized umbrella.

Back in the studio, go over it with a harder pencil, a straightedge and a compass. Rule a faint horizon and the façades, mark the vanishing points, centre the lamp post, draw the edges of the picture, then lower the top edge in charcoal.

Then measure. Fifty-seven tiny pricks from the points of calipers or a proportional compass sit on the horizon, on the lamp post's axis and on three of the vanishing points. Multiplied by about seven, their spacings match the painting.

Did you draw it through an optical device? In 2015 the artist and researcher Pablo Garcia stood at the corner with a camera lucida, a prism on a stand that lets you trace what you see, and found the drawing lines up with its view from about 127 centimetres above the pavement, chest height for a man of 1.67 metres like you. The Art Institute finds the case compelling, but no document confirms it.

Draw the people separately, each on a sheet about 47 by 31 centimetres, mostly without the setting: the couple under one umbrella, a man stepping onto the pavement, two men sharing an umbrella, a woman seen from behind. You draw a man lighting a pipe too, and leave him out.

Some of these sheets are squared, according to the list of a 2019 exhibition in Berlin: a grid lets you copy a figure larger, square by square. No grid has been found on the canvas itself, so how the figures reached it is not known.

Then try it in colour. An oil sketch less than a quarter of the final width fixes the buildings, the figures and the grey light, and you keep going back to it while you paint the big canvas, as a testing ground. The two women by the lamp post are not in it. A second oil study tries out the rain on the stones.

You later give the sketch to Monet, who keeps it in his bedroom at Giverny until his death.

In January 1877 the gallery that housed the last show has been let to an upholsterer. “The exhibition will happen; it has to happen,” you write to Pissarro. With Renoir you rent an empty first-floor flat across the street, at 6 rue Le Peletier; Rivière thought you knew the owner. Each exhibitor guarantees 350 francs, and two or three of the richer ones, probably including you, advance the costs.

You hang the show with Renoir, Monet and Pissarro. It opens on 5 April: eighteen painters, 241 works in the catalogue, and the word impressionnistes on the shields over the door. Your six entries begin with this one, number 1, and Le Pont de l'Europe, number 2. You also lend paintings by Pissarro, Monet and Sisley from your own collection.

According to the critic Charles Bigot, your picture faces Renoir's Bal du moulin de la Galette from the next room, a painting that will later enter your collection.

At least 27 reviews mention it. Edmond Lepelletier calls it the most striking work in the show, with stones you could count and measure. Others complain that the rain is missing, that the umbrellas are all one silver, that the lamp post stands right in the middle and that the frame cuts a man in half. One calls you a millionaire who paints in his spare time.

Since the 1970s people have asked whether you used photographs. In 1976 Kirk Varnedoe and Peter Galassi compared the picture's field of view to a wide-angle lens and suggested you might have traced your drawings from photographs. Others have found reasons to doubt it: a 3D model of the site gives an angle of view of 56 degrees, about a 38 mm lens, not wide-angle; the drawing's paper is too thick to trace through; and in 1877 a camera could not catch moving people and buildings sharply in one shot. The Art Institute now argues for a camera lucida, without a document to prove it. Your brother Martial's photographs, sometimes cited, were made from about 1891.

• After your death in 1894 the painting stayed with your family, from 1900 to 1950 in the care of Martial's brother-in-law at the Château de Montglat, near Provins. Long vertical cracks suggest it was kept rolled up for years; when is not known.
• Walter P. Chrysler Jr. bought it in 1954, and the Art Institute bought it from Wildenstein in 1964, as Umbrellas in the Place de l'Europe on a Rainy Day: the wrong place, a title kept until 1991.
• By then it had been lined and varnished. In 2013–14 the conservator Faye Wrubel removed yellowed varnish and later overpaint: the umbrellas turned lavender again, the darks deepened, and the warmer tone near the buildings proved to be yours.

Before the 2013–14 cleaning: Google Art Project's photograph, online by December 2011.

After: the Art Institute's photograph. Some of the difference is the photography.