The work was made towards the end of Pissarro's career, when he abandoned his experiments with Pointillism and returned to a looser Impressionist style.

It is part of a series of works that Pissarro made in 1897–98 from a window of the Grand Hôtel du Louvre, looking down across the edge of the Place du Théâtre Français (now the Place André-Malraux [fr]) and along the rue Saint-Honoré, portraying the people, carriages and buildings, the trees, fountains and streetlamps, in an early afternoon shower of rain.

A claim that the painting was Nazi looted art was dismissed by US federal courts in 2019 and 2020, on the grounds that the law of Spain applied.

She remarried, but in 1939, as a German Jew, she was forced to sell the painting to Jakob Scheidwimmer, an official of the Reichskammer der bildenden Künste [de], for the low price of 900 ℛ︁ℳ︁ to secure an exit visa, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War.

In 1958, a German court awarded Lilly Cassirer Neubauer compensation of DM 120,000, the fair market value for the work.

As a result, on September 16, 2024, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill which expressly overrides California's governmental interest test for resolving a conflict of laws in the specific context of "art or personal property taken in cases of political persecution" and instead prescribes that California substantive law will always control.