La Cour d'Albane, Rouen

What you are looking at

This is not the famous west façade but a side view few people know. A massive Gothic tower of Rouen Cathedral fills the left two-thirds of the canvas, its pointed lancet windows dark slits in pale, sunlit stone. The stone is painted in lavender, cream and blue with touches of gold, and the tower's shadowed edge is a strong line of ultramarine against the sky. To the right, a cluster of old houses crowds against the cathedral's flank: steep roofs, dormers, a chimney, half-timbered gables with rows of bright windows, and at the bottom right a dark round archway leading out of the court.

The sky is a soft, even blue, brushed in loose diagonal strokes. At the bottom, the paved ground of the court is a pale, sunny lilac. The tower is cut off at the top, as Monet cuts off the façade in the portal pictures, so its height seems to continue beyond the frame.

The signature, Claude Monet, with a date, is at lower right.

The Cour d'Albane

The Cour d'Albane is a courtyard on the north side of Rouen Cathedral, enclosed by the cathedral's walls and by former canons' houses. Claude Monet painted it in 1892, during his first campaign in Rouen, alongside the views of the west front that became the Rouen Cathedral series. Only a handful of Cour d'Albane pictures exist; another, La Cour d'Albane, temps gris, shows the same motif in overcast weather.

The subject let Monet set the cathedral against domestic architecture, medieval stone against the patterned timber and plaster of ordinary houses. It is a more picturesque and traditional view than the portal canvases, closer to the town views of earlier painters.

How it was painted

The paint is thick and broken, especially on the tower, where Monet builds up the stone with layers of short, dry strokes in violet, cream and blue. The houses are handled more descriptively, their windows picked out in squares of white and yellow, their timbers in dark lines. The blue of the sky is thinner, laid in sweeping strokes that contrast with the crust of the masonry.

The color logic is that of sun in a cool season: lit surfaces in cream and gold, shadows in clear blue and violet, no black anywhere.

How this version differs

Compared with the gray-weather version, this canvas is bright and sunny, its tower glowing against a blue sky. Compared with the portal views, such as the Met's The Portal (Sunlight) or the MFA Boston's dawn view of the Façade and Tour d'Albane, it is more anecdotal: houses, windows, an archway, a sense of a real place in a real town. It shows Monet at the start of the Rouen project, still exploring which view of the cathedral to commit to.

Looking closely

Look at the windows of the timber-framed houses on the right. Each pane is a single square touch of white, pale yellow or blue, and together they glitter in the sun. On the tower, the shadowed edge is a strong ultramarine line that runs the full height of the canvas, separating stone from sky. The dark archway at the lower right is the deepest tone in the picture.

Ownership and where to see it

Catalogued as Wildenstein 1317, the painting has been in the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Massachusetts, since 1956 (accession SC 1956:24). Sources differ slightly on its dimensions, giving about 92 by 73 centimeters. Smith's museum also owns Monet's earlier The Seine at Bougival, Evening. See our guide to where to see Monet's paintings.