Pissarro first visited Paris in September 1855, when the city was hosting the Exposition Universelle des produits de l’Agriculture, de l’Industrie et des Beaux-Arts. It was the beginning of the Second French Empire, and Napoleon III and Georges-Eugène Haussmann were determined to turn Paris into “the most wonderful city in the world”, even if it meant demolishing nearly 20,000 buildings and ousting thousands of people from their homes.

This radical urban makeover entailed a highly specialised model of land use, property speculation and, consequently, the superiority of certain citizens to others. The new urban layout served the interests of the bourgeois ruling class rather than those of the working classes. The result was a new model of city that imposed a new way of life for its residents; very little remained of the old Paris of narrow streets and tenement communities.

If we examine Rue Saint-Honoré in the Afternoon. Effect of Rain as an urban planning record, it seems as though the Impressionist master wanted to emphasise the frenzied pace of pedestrians, the heavy traffic along that road, and the Haussmannian aesthetic of the street-wall.

He also captured the symmetry and horizontality of the buildings, whose seamless continuity is reinforced by the arrangement of the balconies, windows and cornices: in these five or six-storey structures, the ground floor was used for shops and businesses and the rest for private residences.

In addition, Pissarro copied the position of the fountains and trees in the Place du Théâtre-Français (now Place André Malraux) with almost surgical precision, recalling the fact that Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann had decided to create numerous tree-shaded squares like those of London, with the aim of bringing nature into the urban space.