Rouen Cathedral, the Portal and the Tour d'Albane, Grey Weather

What you are looking at

The cathedral is seen at an angle. The tall square tower on the north side rises on the left almost to the top of the canvas, and the gabled west front steps up to the right, its pinnacles jagged against a low, gray sky. Everything is painted in grays and blues, slate, pewter, lavender and steel, with no sun anywhere. The tower is a pale, solid mass; the façade a denser, darker lattice of niches and arches; the portals at the bottom deep blue-violet hollows.

The Rouen museum points to the one warm note: a touch of orange on the clock dial below the great rose window, at the center of the façade. Look at the upper left corner too. A scatter of small dark marks against the sky, beside the tower's summit, are birds wheeling around the cathedral, a rare touch of life in the series. At the lower left, the houses at the edge of the square are pinkish blocks with small windows, the only other warmth in the picture.

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

Rouen, 1893–94

Claude Monet painted the cathedral in late winter and spring of 1892 and 1893, renting rooms around the square. In 1893 he worked partly from rooms above a shop on the rue du Grand-Pont, near the southwest corner, which gave him angled views like this one, with the north tower prominent. Monet's catalogue raisonné calls it the Tour d'Albane; many scholars identify it as the Tour Saint-Romain. He completed the series at Giverny in 1894. See the Rouen Cathedral series.

How it was painted

The canvas is one of the larger ones, about 102 by 74 centimeters. Monet keeps the palette almost monochrome, building the façade from layer upon layer of short, dry strokes of gray and blue, with lilac and a little green mixed in. The surface is heavily crusted. With no direct light, he describes the architecture through small differences of tone, slightly lighter on the tower's face, slightly darker in the portals, rather than through shadow.

How this version differs

The angled view with the tower exists in several weathers. The MFA Boston's Façade and Tour d'Albane (Morning Effect) is blue against a pale dawn sky; the Fondation Beyeler's Portal, Morning Effect has a lemon-yellow sky; the Pushkin Museum's Portal and Tower, Midday is in full sun. The Rouen canvas is the gray-weather version, the counterpart of the Orsay's frontal Portal, Grey Weather: no sun, little contrast, and a building that seems to merge with the clouded sky.

Depeaux and Rouen

François Depeaux, a coal and shipping magnate, built one of the largest Impressionist collections in Normandy and was a close supporter of Monet and Sisley. His gift of 1909 made the Rouen museum one of the most important Impressionist collections in France outside Paris. It is fitting that his choice from the series was a gray-day view: the cathedral as the people of Rouen most often saw it, under Norman cloud.

Ownership and where to see it

The Rouen industrialist and collector François Depeaux, a major patron of Monet and of the Impressionists, chose this canvas for his collection in 1895, the year of the Paris exhibition. He gave his collection to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen in 1909 (inventory 1909.1.32). Catalogued as Wildenstein 1345, it is the only canvas of the series on view in the city it depicts, a few minutes' walk from the cathedral itself. See our guide to where to see Monet's paintings.