In the rain

It falls without warning, erasing contours, vibrating the light, transforming the landscape... Rain disturbs as much as it reassures, annoys as much as it amazes. The Musée d'arts de Nantes dedicates its major exhibition 2025 to rain, exploring the intimate and sensitive relationship we have with it, which fascinated artists from the late 19^th century to the 1930s.

Rain is an evasive pattern and a challenge for the artist. How to represent this translucent, colorless element that cloaks the landscape and obscures the horizon? Attentive to its many variations, plein-air painters, and later the Impressionists, left their studios to embrace an experience that was both sensitive and physical. Witnesses to the metamorphosis of cities, they also drew a portrait of an urban society that paced the streets and boulevards in the rain. Here, the challenge is less to represent the rain than to suggest the effervescence of the modern city around the umbrella, the iconic object of a new popular culture.

Between art and social history, the exhibition also evokes the progress of meteorological science, which has played a decisive role in understanding our contemporary approach to the weather. Favoring a sensory approach, the exhibition features over 150 works, mixing painting, photography, literature, sound fragments and film extracts.

In the Patio, the exhibition continues in the Salle Blanche and the Chapelle de l'Oratoire, where two contemporary counterpoints are presented: a video work by Julius von Bismarck and a sound installation by Zimoun, revealing our ambivalent relationship with rain.

Painting in the rain

By challenging the ways of painting, rain played a part in the emergence of an artistic questioning of the transcription of sensations and optical effects that continued through to Impressionism and beyond. From sublime depressions (from Gustave Courbet to Tal Coat) to vaporous atmospheres (William Turner, Martin Johnson Heade, Angelo Morbelli), its representation frees itself from any narrative, oscillating between blur, line and point (Claude Monet, Paul Sérusier), nourished by the graphic proposition of Japanese prints, those "images of the floating world" collected by numerous artists (Hiroshige, Toyokoni II, Hokusaï).

Living in the rain

In fast-growing cities, with wide asphalt avenues opening up vast vistas and facilitating travel, modern lifestyles have come to terms with rain as a mere meteorological inconvenience. The motif of city-dwellers - trottin, Parisienne and worker alike - crossing muddy streets and bridges took hold in the 1880s-1890s (Joseph Palizzy, Jean Béraud, Honoré Daumier). A social and urban portrait took shape, often full of humor. The singular silhouette of the umbrella, a clothing accessory that punctuates and completes the silhouette, is introduced into this imagery, becoming the object of formal fantasies in compositions by Leonetto Capiello, Christian Krohg and Félix Vallotton.

Dreaming of rain

Paul Verlaine invented glominessand urban spleen, while Barbara sang of rain in Nantes. The symbolic association of rain with melancholy coincides with the birth of a modern sensibility and imagination at the dawn of the 20^th century. Joining the wander as he strolls through the city, the painter and photographer translate into fluid perspectives and shimmering fragments an aesthetic experience of the city in the rain (Albert Marquet, Émile Claus, Charles Lacoste, Brassaï, Alfred Stieglitz). Under the eye of filmmaker Joris Ivens, frozen, blurred, graphic and vibrating like a silent melody, rain becomes a binding element, like a blanket of water (Regen, 1929).

Vidéo pitch… au cœur de l’exposition !

Marie-Anne du Boullay, commissaire de l’exposition nous présente Sous la pluie. Peindre, vivre et rêver.

Ce qu’ils en disent…

Pris sur le vif lors de leur venue au musée, des visiteurs nous donnent leur sentiment face à quelques œuvres. Un retour d’expérience sensible et sans filtre !

Épisode 1 : Hockney

Épisode 2 : Caillebotte

Épisode 3 : Angrand

Retour sur le week-end festif !

Les 8 et 9 novembre 2025, le Musée d’arts de Nantes a organisé un week-end inaugural pour le lancement de l’exposition Sous la pluie. Peindre, vivre et rêver. Un programme riche de surprise, d’amusements divers et de découvertes artistiques. Retour en images sur l’événement.

Catalog published for the exhibition Sous la pluie. Peindre, vivre et rêver presented at the Musée d'arts de Nantes from November 7th, 2025 to March 1st, 2026, then at the Musée des Beaux-arts de Rouen from April 11th to September 20th, 2026.

Co-published by Musée d'arts de Nantes and Musée des Beaux-arts de Rouen.

Available for consultation at the museum library, and on sale at the museum bookshop-boutique.

All museum publications

Books selected by the museum library

Here is a selection of books related to the exhibition Sous la pluie. Painting, living and dreaming. You can consult them at the library New Window by appointment.