Rouen Cathedral, Fog

What you are looking at

The cathedral is a shadow in a blue cloud. Monet looks at the west front from an angle, so the tall square tower rises on the left of the canvas and the gabled façade steps up to the right, its pinnacles making a jagged silhouette against a whitish sky. But fog has swallowed nearly everything. The tower is a pale column of blue-gray, the façade a darker mass of cobalt and lavender, and the bottom of the picture is an undivided haze of blue strokes in which the portals can only just be made out.

The sky is a warm off-white, faintly pink at the left edge and pale lemon near the top, suggesting the sun is up somewhere beyond the mist. On the façade, the great rose window shows as a slightly darker oval in the blue, and the clock dial below it as a faint ring. There is no hard edge anywhere in the picture.

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

Rouen, 1893

Claude Monet returned to Rouen in February 1893 for a second campaign on the cathedral. Along with rooms facing the portal, he rented space above a shop at 81 rue du Grand-Pont, at the southwest corner of the square, which gave him this angled view with the north tower (called the Tour d'Albane in Monet's catalogue raisonné; many scholars identify it as the Tour Saint-Romain). He finished the series at Giverny in 1894. See the Rouen Cathedral series for the whole group.

How it was painted

Monet keeps the palette almost monochrome: ultramarine, cobalt, violet and white, with a little pink and yellow in the sky. The strokes are short and broken, laid in crisscrossing layers so the blue seems to vibrate. In the lower half the brushwork loosens and runs in diagonal flicks, which reads as moving mist. The building's outline is the only drawing, and even that is soft.

How this version differs

The angled view with the tower exists in several weathers. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has the dawn version, Façade and Tour d'Albane (Morning Effect), where the building is also blue but crisp against the sky. The Musée d'Orsay's Morning Effect turns it white, and the Pushkin Museum's Portal and Tower, Midday shows it in full sun. This canvas goes furthest toward dissolution: the tower in particular is less a structure than a column of fog. Among the frontal views, the Folkwang's The Portal, Morning Fog is its counterpart.

Looking closely

The only crisp marks on the canvas are the pale lines along the edges of the tower and the jagged tips of the gables against the sky. Everything below dissolves into broken blue strokes. At lower left, the signature in dark blue is the sharpest mark of all.

Fog as a subject

Fog fascinated Monet long before Rouen; his 1872 Impression, Sunrise is a picture of morning mist on the harbor at Le Havre. A decade after the cathedrals he would make fog the central subject of his London views of the Thames. The Rouen fog pictures sit between those two moments.

Ownership and where to see it

Catalogued as Wildenstein 1349, the painting is in a private collection, and published information about its size and ownership history is limited. To see the fog effect in a public museum, visit the Museum Folkwang in Essen; for the angled view, the MFA Boston and the Musée d'Orsay. Our guide to where to see Monet's paintings lists the rest.