Rue Saint-Honoré, dans l'après-midi. Effet de pluie

Umbrellas, carriages and wet pavements shine in an afternoon shower on a Paris street. Pissarro painted the view from a hotel window in 1897, and the canvas later became the centre of one of the longest fights over art taken under the Nazis.

The story behind the painting

In 1897 and 1898 Camille Pissarro, near the end of his career, made a series of paintings from a window of the Grand Hôtel du Louvre in Paris. He looked down across the edge of the Place du Théâtre Français, now the Place André-Malraux, and along the rue Saint-Honoré. By then he had left his experiments with Pointillism behind and returned to a looser Impressionist style. This canvas shows the street in an early afternoon shower of rain, while other pictures in the series show a similar scene in morning sunlight or in the shadows of evening.

What to look for

The view is taken from above, so the street opens out like a stage. Look for the people and the carriages moving through the rain, the buildings lining the street, the trees, and the fountains and streetlamps of the square. Wikidata names one of them as the Fountain of the River Nymph. The loose, broken brushwork belongs to Pissarro's late return to Impressionism after his Pointillist phase. The painting is fairly modest in size, 81 by 65 cm, and its grey wet light is the real subject: the same corner of Paris, seen at one particular moment of weather.

Meaning and intent

The picture was bought from Pissarro in 1897 by the German businessman Julius Cassirer, and passed to his son Fritz and then to Fritz's wife Lilly. In 1939, as a German Jew, Lilly was forced to sell it to Jakob Scheidwimmer, an official of the Reich chamber of fine arts, to secure an exit visa shortly before the Second World War. It was sold at auction in Berlin in 1943 and disappeared from public view. In 1958 a German court awarded Lilly compensation. A quiet rainy street thus carries the weight of persecution and loss.

Legacy

The painting has hung in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid since the museum opened in 1992, after Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza bought it in New York in 1976. In 2005 Lilly's grandson Claude Cassirer and other heirs claimed it. A Spanish court ruled for the museum in 2015, and US courts did so in 2019 and 2020. In 2022 the US Supreme Court ruled that California law should decide the choice of law; in 2024 the Ninth Circuit again favoured the museum. California then passed a new law, and in March 2025 the Supreme Court sent the case back for further proceedings.