La Cour d'Albane, temps gris

What you are looking at

A great Gothic tower of Rouen Cathedral fills the left side of the canvas and rises out of the top edge. Its walls are painted in violet, slate blue and gray, with dark lancet windows set in tall blind arches, and the stone has a rough, mottled look. To the right, packed against its base, is a jumble of old houses: a sloping tiled roof, a projecting timber-framed house with rows of small white windows, steep gables and dormers further back, and at bottom right a dark round archway leading out of the court. The paving in the foreground is a warm, pale pink-gray.

The sky is overcast, a flat, soft gray-lavender with no hint of sun, and that is what distinguishes the picture. Without cast shadows, the colors stay close in value, purple-gray tower, brown and ocher houses, gray sky, and the scene has a quiet, damp, wintry feel. A few touches of green in the timbering and pink in the walls warm it slightly.

The signature and date, Claude Monet 94, are at lower left.

The Cour d'Albane, 1892

The Cour d'Albane is a courtyard on the north side of Rouen Cathedral, hemmed in by the cathedral walls and old canons' houses. Claude Monet painted it in 1892, during his first Rouen campaign, alongside the views of the west front that became the Rouen Cathedral series. He made a sunny version of the same view, La Cour d'Albane, Rouen, now at Smith College, and finished both later at Giverny; this one carries the date 1894.

How it was painted

Monet builds the tower in dense, layered strokes of violet, blue and gray, so the stone has the same porous crust as the façade canvases. The houses are more descriptive: windows are picked out in white and pale blue squares, timbers in dark lines, roofs in warm ocher and brown. The sky is smoother and lighter, a flat backdrop against which the tower's edge and the houses' gables stand out.

The gray weather gives Monet a chance to explore the subtle color of an overcast day, the same problem he tackles in the Orsay's frontal Portal, Grey Weather.

How this version differs

Set against its sunny twin at Smith College, which glows in cream and lavender under a blue sky, this canvas is darker, cooler and more somber, the tower a heavy violet mass rather than a sunlit one. It is a reminder that Monet applied his series method even to the side views of the cathedral: same motif, same framing, different weather. Compare the angled west-front views such as the Rouen museum's Portal and Tour d'Albane, Grey Weather.

Looking closely

The most surprising passage is the paving at the bottom, a band of warm pink and gray laid in short horizontal strokes, which brings a little light into the enclosed court. Above it, the timber-framed house juts forward with its rows of small windows, each one a single dab of white or pale blue. The dark archway at the right, the only way out of the court, gives the picture a sense of depth that the flat façade views do not have.

Ownership and where to see it

Catalogued as Wildenstein 1318, the painting is in a private collection; a Cour d'Albane canvas of about 92 by 65 centimeters was sold at Sotheby's London in 1996, but the published record is thin. The sunny version can be seen at the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Massachusetts. See our guide to where to see Monet's paintings.