Square · Quartier de l'Europe (8th) · 8e arrondissement

Place de Dublin

Name: Place de Dublin
Address: place de Dublin, Paris, 75008, FR

The buildingStill standing

Getting inWalk straight in

What's there nowStill the same

A public street junction, freely walkable. Of all the locations in this Atlas it is among the closest to how its painting shows it.

The star-shaped junction in the Quartier de l'Europe where Gustave Caillebotte set Paris Street; Rainy Day — and one of the few places in Paris where you can stand almost exactly where a famous painting was composed and recognise everything.

Address: place de Dublin, 75008 Paris
Years: Laid out in the Haussmann rebuilding of the Quartier de l'Europe

The place, briefly

Gustave Caillebotte painted Paris Street; Rainy Day in 1877, and it is now among the best-known images of the nineteenth-century city: a wide wet junction, umbrellas, a couple advancing at the right, a lamp-post cutting the canvas in two.

The junction is this one. The quarter had only recently been cut through by Haussmann's engineers, and the picture is about that newness — the pale stone still clean, the pavements enormous, the space slightly too big for the people crossing it. Caillebotte lived a few streets away and knew exactly what he was looking at.

What makes it worth visiting is how little has changed. The radial alignment of the buildings, the acute-angled corner behind the couple, the sightlines down each street: they are all still there. Most Impressionist sites have been rebuilt beyond recognition. This one has not.

The painting itself is in Chicago, at the Art Institute.

Key facts

The painting: Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877
Where the painting is: The Art Institute of Chicago
The quarter: The Europe district, newly cut by Haussmann's rebuilding
Why go: The buildings and sightlines are substantially unchanged
Access: A public junction — walk in

Timeline

1877
Caillebotte paints Paris Street; Rainy Day and shows it at the third Impressionist exhibition.

On the map

Questions before you go

Where was Paris Street; Rainy Day painted?

At the place de Dublin, a star-shaped junction in the Quartier de l'Europe in the 8th arrondissement, in 1877.

Does it still look like the painting?

Remarkably closely. The radial building alignment, the sharp corner and the street sightlines are all still recognisable.

Where can I see the painting?

At the Art Institute of Chicago.

People who knew this place

Gustave Caillebotte

French · Painter

The star-shaped junction in the Quartier de l'Europe where Caillebotte composed Paris Street; Rainy Day in 1877. The buildings and sightlines survive largely unchanged.

Within walking distance

Apartment · Quartier de l'Europe (8th)

4 rue de Saint-Pétersbourg

Manet's studio through the 1870s, whose windows looked down on what was then the rue Mosnier — the street he painted repeatedly, flags and all, in the summer of 1878.

Visit the place

Bridge · Quartier de l'Europe (8th)

Pont de l'Europe

The iron bridge carrying six streets across the tracks behind Gare Saint-Lazare — the subject of Gustave Caillebotte's 1876 painting, and the spot where Impressionism looked hardest at industrial Paris.

Visit the place

Apartment · Quartier de l'Europe (8th)

39 rue de Saint-Pétersbourg

The apartment Édouard Manet moved to in 1878 and remained associated with until his death in 1883, in the last years when illness had reduced what he could physically paint.

Visit the place

Apartment · Quartier de l'Europe (8th)

42 rue de Londres

One of Claude Debussy's documented Paris homes, and his address until around 1894 — the years in which he wrote the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune and began Pelléas et Mélisande.

Visit the place

The Friday Letter

Paris, one address at a time.

The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.