Gustave Caillebotte's intersection with greatness

You see it from the moment you enter the exhibition, Gustave Caillebotte's masterpiece and one of the most famous paintings of the past 150 years. Paris Street, Rainy Day, borrowed from the Art Institute of Chicago, is placed at the end of a short enfilade of three galleries, documenting the impressionist painter's best work, most of it made while he was an urban animal, a wealthy dandy, a self-styled flaneur, and an impressionist impresario with the means and the energy to shape a movement.

When you are standing in front of it, admiring the glistening wet cobblestones, the severe geometry of Parisian streets and the cheerful bustle of its gloomy weather, you may think that the rest of Caillebotte's work will be more of the same. But the layout of the galleries follows the strange progress of his career.

From Paris Street, Rainy Day, the show continues with a sharp right turn to other subjects, including nudes, still lifes and brightly painted scenes of gracious suburban living. This second tranche of Caillebotte may seem a bit of a disappointment.

The curators of the National Gallery of Art's "Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter's Eye", a satisfying and enlightening exhibition that brings together some 50 of the artist's best paintings, won't mind that. They acknowledge it in the catalogue and have arranged the exhibition to place Caillebotte's later work in a satellite relation to a handful of great paintings, most of them made in the 1870s or early 1880s.

"We would not have done the show without that," says Mary Morton, head of French paintings at the NGA, pointing to Paris Street, Rainy Day.