Some Aspects of Life in Paris, 11: A Street on a Rainy Evening (Rue le soir sous la pluie)

Pierre Bonnard

Color lithograph on paper

Museum of Modern Art

This color lithograph is the eleventh plate in Pierre Bonnard's celebrated portfolio Quelques aspects de la vie de Paris, commissioned by the dealer Ambroise Vollard and published in Paris in 1899 in an edition of one hundred. The composition depicts a Parisian street on a rainy evening, with silhouetted figures moving through lamplit, rain-slicked thoroughfares—capturing the atmospheric transience of urban nocturnal life. Bonnard, a founding member of the Post-Impressionist group Les Nabis, brought to the series a distinctive economy of color and a flattened, Japanese-influenced sense of pictorial space, rendering the city's fleeting moments with expressive, sketch-like lines. The portfolio as a whole is widely regarded as the apogee of Bonnard's printmaking career, and this plate exemplifies his mastery of mood, light, and the poetry of the everyday Parisian scene.