Rouen Cathedral, Portal

What you are looking at

The façade of Rouen Cathedral rises edge to edge in a canvas almost entirely given over to warm color. The stone is red, coral, rose and brick, laid in thick, scumbled strokes that leave flecks of violet and blue showing through. Only at the top, between the jagged gables and pinnacles, does a cool sky appear, a muted gray-blue that reads almost green beside so much red. The great rose window above the central portal is an oval of deeper crimson and violet, and below it the small clock dial is a single bright point of white and yellow, like a lamp.

The lower façade dissolves. The three portals and their sculpture are suggested only by soft, smoky arches of pink, mauve and pale yellow, with a few lighter touches near the bottom edge where the stone catches reflected light from the square. There is almost no drawing; the building is a field of colored vibration.

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

Rouen, 1892–94

Claude Monet spent the late winter of 1892 in Rouen, painting the cathedral's west front from rented rooms across the square, and returned for a second campaign in 1893. He worked on many canvases in rotation, picking up each when its light returned. Back at Giverny he spent much of 1894 bringing the series to completion, which is why so many of the canvases, this one included, carry the date '94.

In May 1895 he showed twenty of them at Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris. For how the whole group of some thirty pictures fits together, see the Rouen Cathedral series.

How it was painted

The surface is one of the heaviest in the series, a thick crust built up over many sessions. Monet dragged stiff paint across dried layers so that the color broke on the ridges, leaving the earlier colors visible in the hollows. The result is a texture that seems to imitate weathered limestone, pitted and granular.

The palette is limited. Reds and pinks dominate; blues and violets are woven in for shadow; the sky is a single, flat cool tone. That restraint gives the picture its unity. Reproductions of this canvas vary considerably in color, from a hot brick red to a softer rose, so the original is best judged in person.

How this version differs

Most of the late-afternoon canvases split the façade between a lit top and a shaded base, as in the Marmottan's Sunlight Effect, End of the Day. Here the whole building is suffused with the same warm red, as if the light came from the air itself rather than from the sun. It is the most intensely colored of the pink and red group, which also includes the Belgrade Rouen Cathedral and the Cardiff Symphony in Pink and Grey. Set beside the cool, bleached West Façade, Sunlight in Washington, it shows how far Monet pushed color away from the gray of real stone.

Monet in Japan

Japanese collectors were among the earliest buyers of Monet outside France; Kojiro Matsukata visited him at Giverny in the 1920s. Today Japan has some of the largest public holdings of Monet's work anywhere, and the Pola Museum's group of Monets, which spans his career from the 1870s to the water lilies, is among the most complete. The Rouen canvas is its representative of the 1890s series.

Ownership and where to see it

Catalogued as Wildenstein 1328, the painting is in the Pola Museum of Art (inventory 006-0510), which opened in 2002 in the forest at Hakone, southwest of Tokyo. Its collection was assembled by Tsuneshi Suzuki of the Pola cosmetics group and includes one of Japan's largest holdings of French Impressionism, with several Monets. Check the museum's schedule before visiting. See our guide to where to see Monet's paintings.