Rouen Cathedral

What you are looking at

The west front of Rouen Cathedral rises to the top of the canvas, cropped tight at both sides, its gables and pinnacles cut out against a sky of pale turquoise green. Almost every surface of the stone is pink: rose, salmon and coral in the upper façade, cooling to lilac and blue-gray in the lower half, where the three portals sink into soft shadow. In the center the great rose window is a dim oval of violet and ocher, and below it a small white disk, the clock dial, catches the light like a coin.

The effect is of warm, low light washing over the upper stonework while the base of the building stays in cool shade. The turquoise of the sky is the complementary of the pink, and the two together give the picture its flushed, almost glowing tone. That is why the canvas is sometimes called the Pink Cathedral. At the bottom right, warm patches of red-orange mark the recesses of the side portal.

The signature, Claude Monet, is at lower right.

Rouen, 1892 and 1893

Claude Monet painted the cathedral during two long stays in Rouen, in the late winter and spring of 1892 and 1893. He rented rooms in buildings on the square facing the west front and worked on a whole rack of canvases at once, turning from one to the next as the sun moved across the stone. He finished them in his studio at Giverny in 1894.

The series, about thirty canvases in all, is the most radical of Monet's 1890s projects: the same Gothic façade, nearly the same framing, painted again and again until the building becomes a screen for colored light. Twenty of the canvases were shown at Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris in May 1895. For an overview of the group, see the Rouen Cathedral series.

How it was painted

The surface is dense and granular, built in layer after layer of short, dry touches. Monet drags pale pink over darker underpaint so that the lower colors break through in flecks of blue and violet, which gives the stone its crumbling, porous look. The sky is handled differently, in flatter, smoother strokes of green-blue that make the jagged silhouette of the gables stand out.

The drawing is reduced to a few vertical accents: the buttresses, the pinnacles, the outlines of the arches. Monet was not interested in the sculpture of the portals, only in how light sat on their projections and fell into their hollows.

How this version differs

The closest relatives are the pink and gray canvases painted late in the day. The Cardiff Rouen Cathedral, Symphony in Grey and Pink has the same turquoise sky and rose stone but is cooler and grayer overall. The Pushkin Museum's Rouen Cathedral, Evening pushes toward deeper orange and violet. The Belgrade canvas is the most evenly pink of the group, with less contrast between upper and lower façade than the Marmottan's Portal, Sunlight, End of the Day, where the top of the building blazes gold.

A cathedral in Belgrade

French painting reached Belgrade's museum largely through gifts and purchases in the twentieth century, and the Monet is among the most popular works in its European galleries. For visitors in southeastern Europe it is one of the few places to see a canvas from the series without traveling to Paris, Moscow or Cardiff. The National Museum reopened in 2018 after a long renovation, so the painting is once again on regular display.

Ownership and where to see it

Catalogued as Wildenstein 1329, the painting is in the National Museum of Serbia in Belgrade, which holds one of the most important collections of French painting in the Balkans. It is a highlight of the museum's display of European art. Published details of its dimensions and provenance are scarce. For other canvases from the series, see our guide to where to see Monet's paintings.