Rouen Cathedral, Evening

What you are looking at

The west portal faces us head on and fills the tall canvas. Late in the day the sun has swung round to the west, so for once the façade is lit from the front, and Monet paints the stone in apricot, peach, pale gold and pink. At the top the openwork gables and pinnacles stand against a strip of clear, deep blue sky. Below them the rose window is a dim, bluish hollow ringed with warm light, and beneath it the small round clock-like disc of the tympanum catches the sun. At the bottom the great central doorway is a pointed arch with a glowing orange-red core.

The lower third of the picture is different. A band of cool violet and blue rises across the base of the façade, as if the shadow of the houses on the square were climbing the cathedral as the sun sinks. The doorways are half drowned in it. This division, warm stone above and cold shadow below, is the subject of the picture: the last few minutes before the whole front goes into shade. At lower right a small patch of red, perhaps a shop front or awning on the square, is the only object in the picture that is not cathedral. The signature and date, "Claude Monet 94," run along the lower left.

Rouen, 1892–93

Monet worked on the series in Rouen, the Norman city on the Seine downstream from Giverny, in the late winter and spring of 1892 and again in 1893. He painted from rented rooms on the square facing the west front, keeping many canvases going and switching between them as the light changed. He reworked them in his Giverny studio and dated most of them 1894, as he did this one. Twenty were exhibited at Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris in May 1895.

How it was painted

The canvas is about 100 by 65 centimeters, slightly smaller than most of the series. The paint is applied in thick, dry, overlapping touches, warm over cool in the lit stone and cool over warm in the shadowed base. The rose window and doorways are scumbled thinly, so their darker underlayers show through. The crusted surface makes the stone feel physical even as the color turns it into light. The sky is the one smooth passage: a flat, saturated blue laid in around the gables at the end, its coolness making the warm stone look warmer still. Monet uses the same trick of complementary color, orange against blue, that drives the noon canvases, but here it is the sky rather than the shadows that supplies the blue.

Its place in the series

The series is gathered in our Rouen Cathedral hub. The Pushkin Museum owns two canvases from it, this frontal sunset view and an oblique noon view with the tower at left, Portal and Tower d'Albane, Midday (Wildenstein 1350). Their titles are often swapped in books and online. Compare the same frontal portal in full sun in Rouen Cathedral in Full Sunlight in Paris and in softer light in Rouen Cathedral in Sunlight at the Clark, and the dawn view of Effects of Morning Light.

Meaning

Claude Monet said he was painting the air between himself and the building rather than the building itself. A low, warm light turns the stone to embers, and the medieval cathedral becomes, for a moment, something closer to a natural phenomenon, like a cliff at sunset. The creeping shadow at the base gives the picture a sense of time passing that few of the series canvases have.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. It belonged to the Moscow collector Sergei Shchukin, whose collection was nationalized after the 1917 Revolution. For museums elsewhere holding the series, see where to see Monet's paintings.