Temps de pluie

Temps de pluie — rainy weather — belongs to Lebourg's practice of recording the Seine valley in all its meteorological moods, including the overcast, wet conditions that Normans and Parisians knew better than the bright sunshine of Monet's most celebrated river views. Rainy weather was both a practical condition that Post-Impressionist painters learned to work in outdoors and a subject with its own aesthetic interest: the reduced contrast, the wet reflections on stone and road, and the grey unity of tonality that rain imposed on the landscape. Lebourg's rainy-weather paintings are among his most atmospherically sensitive, capturing a quality of northern French light that complemented rather than competed with the sunlit views of his Impressionist predecessors. The Petit Palais acquired this as part of its collection of atmospheric landscape.

Lebourg uses a severely restricted palette of grey, pewter, and muted green to capture the flattening effect of rainy weather on landscape color, applying paint in fluid, horizontal strokes that suggest both the rain's movement and the wet surfaces it creates. The composition is unified by a pale, diffuse light source rather than any directional illumination.