Image: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen
From 11 April to 20 September 2026, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen will dedicate a major exhibition to rain and its evocative power. The exhibition brings together 150 works and enters into dialogue with a scientific component at the Pavillon des Transitions, extending its exploration from the late eighteenth century to contemporary climate challenges.
Its central question is how to represent an element that is translucent and colourless, yet capable of veiling the landscape and obscuring the horizon. The exhibition also frames rain as a force that veils light, blurs the boundaries between earth and sky, covers surfaces, and permeates air and soil.
The exhibition’s parcours is organised into three sequences, each addressing different facets of rain and its representation. The first traces the gradual emergence of rain as a landscape motif, from Romanticism to the Impressionists, alongside the influence of Japanese prints.
The second turns to the nineteenth-century city, where umbrellas and waterproof clothing changed urban life and prompted artists to depict new postures, silhouettes, and scenes shaped by emerging modernity.
For painters and photographers, rain provides material for expressing transience, solitude, and urban poetry.
