Rain is hard to paint. A drop has no color of its own, and it falls too fast for the eye to hold. So most of the painters here looked down rather than up, at a street turned into a mirror and a crowd pressed under umbrellas. And in the middle of a shower, a hare races a locomotive across a bridge.
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How These Were Chosen
Before rain changes anything else, it changes the light. Under a heavy cloud, light comes from the whole sky at once, so shadows almost disappear and colors sink toward gray. The falling water is much harder to catch, and it can only be suggested, most often by thin slanting strokes laid over the scene.
What a painter can really show is what the rain does to things. Wet stone and asphalt reflect, and a street doubles every lamp and every walker. Distance fades, and the far bank of a river or the end of an avenue melts into haze. People open umbrellas, hunch their shoulders, lift their skirts.
For a long time, European painters had little reason to stand out in that weather. When the sky darkened in a picture, it was usually for a storm, a shipwreck or a flood, rarely for an ordinary wet afternoon.
Two changes in the 1800s gave the ordinary shower its place. Cities were paved, lit by gas and filled with crowds, and a rainy street became a spectacle of shine and reflections. Then, after Japan opened to foreign trade in the 1850s, its woodblock prints reached Europe in large numbers. Their designers treated a shower as a subject in its own right, and they drew it as fine straight lines cut into the block.
That is where this list draws its line. The rain had to be visible, either falling or in what it changes: the color of a street, how far the eye can travel, the way people dress and move. A gray sky alone was not enough. The twelve pictures run from the least known to the most famous.
12. Marie Bashkirtseff, The Umbrella (1883)
Just above the girl's head, the wooden shaft of her umbrella is bound with a strip of white. The umbrella is broken, it has been mended in a hurry, and it is still open. Under it, a girl of about nine stands against a gray wall with a black skirt pulled up over her shoulders, staring straight out of the picture.
Marie Bashkirtseff found her model in the streets of Paris in 1883. Born near Poltava, in present-day Ukraine, in 1858, she had been brought to France as a child, and in 1877 she enrolled at the Académie Julian, a private art school that ran a studio for women.
By 1883 she had left the school and chosen another example. Jules Bastien-Lepage, a French realist, painted peasants in the open air, and she wanted to do the same with the children of the Paris streets.
Painting in the open air meant painting in the weather, and her diary shows what that cost her. She had just set up a studio at home, with a small garden to work in, and she described her subject as "a little girl who has put her black skirt over her shoulders and holds her umbrella open." The next line is about the sky: "I work out of doors, and it rains nearly every day."
The rain did not stop. A few days later she called it exasperating, and in the same entry she noted that the picture was finished. Her verdict was harsh: "it is bad, and the little girl had an odious face." She called the child one of her "little street children," pretty and "cross-grained as possible."
Yet not a drop of that rain falls on the canvas. The weather is all in the open umbrella and in the way the girl wraps herself in her clothes, painted in blacks and silver grays. Apart from the yellow wood of the shaft, the only warm color is her face, pink under the black canopy. I find the white strip more moving than the face, a quick repair that keeps the umbrella working in the rain.
At a Glance
Artist: Marie Bashkirtseff (1858 to 1884)
Painted: 1883
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 93 × 74 cm (36.6 × 29.1 in)
Where to see it: State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg
About This Painting
How did The Umbrella reach Russia?
Bashkirtseff's mother, Maria Stepanovna Bashkirtseva, gave it to the Russian Museum in 1904. It hangs in the Mikhailovsky Palace, the museum's main building.
When was Marie Bashkirtseff's diary published?
It first came out in French in 1887, three years after her death, in a heavily cut edition. English translations followed within three years.
Where else can you see Bashkirtseff's work?
The Musée d'Orsay in Paris owns The Meeting (Un meeting), a group of boys gathered on a Paris street, which she showed at the Salon of 1884, where it was a success.
11. John Constable, Rainstorm over the Sea (about 1824 to 1828)
Most of this small sheet is sky. A black cloud hangs over the sea and lets its rain down in long gray streaks that reach the horizon, while to the left white clouds still hold the sun and a single shaft of light breaks through underneath. The sea is only a dark strip along the bottom edge, flecked with white. Somewhere inside the shower, one touch of paint gives the whole storm its size.