Monet's Rouen Cathedral
Monet rented rooms opposite Rouen Cathedral and painted its west front over and over, recording how light and weather changed the stone.
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About the series
Claude Monet painted more than 30 views of the west front of Rouen Cathedral. He worked in Rouen in the early months of 1892 and 1893, painting from rooms facing the cathedral, and finished the canvases in his studio at Giverny.
The viewpoint barely moves. The façade fills almost the whole canvas, and the subject becomes the light itself: grey morning fog, full midday sun, the blue and orange of late afternoon. The surfaces are built up in thick, crusted layers of paint that suggest the texture of the stone. Monet exhibited twenty of the paintings at the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris in 1895. The Musée d'Orsay in Paris holds five, and other versions are in museums in Europe and the United States.
These are tall, narrow compositions, so they fit a hallway or the space between two windows. Two or three different times of day hung in a row show the series at its best.
