Painting the Rain: 9 Artworks That Caught the Weather Everyone Else Avoided
Look out of the window on a wet November afternoon and try to say what colour the rain is. You can't, really. It has no colour of its own. It is a blur, a slant, a sound on the glass, a darkening of the pavement. For centuries most painters simply waited for it to stop. Landscapes were set under blue skies or golden evenings, and if weather appeared at all it was usually a dramatic storm, all lightning and heroics.
Ordinary rain, the grey, steady, everyday kind, is a much harder subject. It is transparent and always in motion, and it drains the brightness out of everything it falls on. To paint it, an artist has to invent a sign for something that can barely be seen. Here are nine works, from a Japanese woodblock to an American river view, where artists found that sign, each in a completely different way.
Utagawa Hiroshige, Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake (1857)
Any list of rain pictures has to begin here, because so many later artists began here too. Published in 1857 as part of Hiroshige's series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, the print shows a wooden bridge over the Sumida River caught in a summer downpour. Small figures hurry across, hunched under hats and straw mats, while the far bank dissolves into grey.
The rain itself is nothing more than fine dark lines cut into the woodblock, laid across the image in two slightly different directions. That crossing of angles is what makes the shower feel heavy and gusting rather than neat. It is a simple idea, and it changed how Western painters thought about weather once Japanese prints began flooding into Europe later in the century.
J. M. W. Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway (1844)
Turner came at rain from the opposite direction: not lines, but fog and smear. Shown at the Royal Academy in 1844 and now in the National Gallery, London, the painting sends a steam train hurtling towards us across a bridge generally identified as Brunel's Maidenhead Railway Bridge. Rain, spray and smoke all melt into one golden haze.
Turner is said to have worked parts of the surface with a palette knife, building the downpour out of thick, almost sculptural paint. Look closely at the lower right and you will find a small hare running along the tracks ahead of the engine. Whether it stands for nature outpaced by machinery, or simply for speed itself, has been argued about ever since.
Gustave Caillebotte, The Yerres, Effect of Rain (1875)
Most people know Caillebotte's rain through his famous Paris street with its umbrellas. This smaller, quieter picture, now at the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University, is in many ways more daring. It shows the little river Yerres, near the Caillebotte family's country estate outside Paris, painted in the summer of 1875.
There is no sky to speak of and no falling rain at all. Instead, Caillebotte paints what the rain does when it lands: dozens of small rings spreading across the surface of the water, overlapping and breaking up the reflections of the trees. A skiff waits on the far bank. It is a picture about listening as much as looking, and it captures that hushed, dripping stillness of a summer shower better than any storm scene could.
Childe Hassam, Rainy Day, Boston (1885)
Before he became one of America's best-known Impressionists, the young Childe Hassam was fascinated by wet city streets. Rainy Day, Boston, now in the Toledo Museum of Art, shows the corner of Columbus Avenue and Appleton Street in the South End, with a railway station tower rising at the end of the avenue.
The real subject is the asphalt. Hassam reportedly loved how a freshly paved street looked when it was wet and shining, catching the reflections of passing people and carriages. Here the pavement becomes a long, pinkish-grey mirror. The wide, half-empty foreground also suggests he had been looking at photographs, which were teaching painters new ways to frame a city.
Ivan Shishkin, Rain in an Oak Forest (1891)
Shishkin is celebrated in Russia as the great painter of forests, and in this canvas from 1891, now in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, he lets the weather take over the woods. Massive oaks fade into a silvery mist, the path glistens, and two small figures share an umbrella as they walk away from us.
What makes the picture work is atmosphere rather than detail. The further back you look, the paler and softer the trees become, as if the rain were a veil hung between each layer of the forest. It is a beautiful lesson in how damp air swallows distance.
Vincent van Gogh, Rain (1889)
Van Gogh owned a copy of Hiroshige's Sudden Shower, and in 1887 he even painted his own version of it in oil. Two years later, while staying at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, he returned to the idea in a work of his own.
Rain, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, shows the walled wheat field he could see from his window, painted in late autumn 1889. Over the fields and hills he draws long, slanting strokes of rain that run at a different angle from the lines of the furrows below. The effect is of looking through a curtain of water, exactly as in the Japanese print, but translated into Van Gogh's own restless brushwork.
Camille Pissarro, the Boulevard Montmartre series (1897)
In 1897 Pissarro, then in his late sixties, took a room at the Grand Hôtel de Russie in Paris and painted the boulevard below from his window over and over again. The result was a series of more than a dozen canvases showing the same street at different times of day and in different weather: morning sun, winter mist, night lamps, a carnival parade, and rain.
In the rainy versions the boulevard turns into a river of grey and violet, carriages blur, and the trees lining the street become soft smudges. Seeing them alongside the sunny views is the best way to understand what rain does to a city: it does not just wet it, it changes its entire colour scheme.
Lesser Ury, Berlin's wet nights (1880s–1920s)
Lesser Ury is far less famous than he deserves to be. Born in 1861 in Birnbaum, in what is now western Poland, he settled in Berlin and became the city's great painter of cafés, lamplight and, above all, rain-soaked streets. Again and again he painted boulevards after a shower, where every streetlamp and shop window doubles itself in the glistening road.
Ury repeated his favourite compositions many times to meet demand, and the weaker copies have unfairly blurred his reputation. At his best, though, he turned wet asphalt into something close to stained glass. Anyone who loves Hassam's Boston should seek out Ury's Berlin.
George Bellows, Rain on the River (1908)
We end in New York with a painter better known for brutal boxing scenes. In Rain on the River, now in the RISD Museum in Providence, Bellows stands on a rocky ledge above Riverside Park and looks out over the Hudson. A freight train steams along the riverside tracks while rain sweeps across the water.
The canvas is almost a diagram of the modern city in bad weather: park, railway, river and a sheet of falling rain, each given its own zone. Bellows himself thought it one of the most beautiful things he had made, and it is easy to see why. The rain does not spoil the view; it pulls the whole messy scene together into a single grey-green mood.
Why Rain Still Matters
What links all nine works is a kind of patience. Painting rain means accepting that the world will look duller, softer and less certain than it does in sunshine, and finding beauty in that anyway. Hiroshige did it with cut lines, Turner with smeared paint, Caillebotte with rings on water, Hassam and Ury with reflections, Van Gogh with slanting strokes.
So the next time a grey day keeps you indoors, look at the window the way these artists did. The rain may have no colour of its own, but it changes the colour of everything else.
