Rouen Cathedral, Portal and Tower d'Albane, Midday

What you are looking at

The canvas is tall and narrow, and the cathedral fills it almost to the edges. On the left rises the square mass of the Tour d'Albane, the cathedral's oldest tower, cut off by the top of the picture. To the right is the west front: the great central portal, the rose window above it, and a crown of Gothic gables and pinnacles against a small strip of pale blue sky in the upper right corner. At the bottom right a sliver of a neighboring building pokes in. There is no square, no street and no people.

The light is high and flat, the light of midday. The stone is painted in pale blues, creams, pinks and ochres, with very few dark shadows; the portals are warm brownish recesses, and the rest of the facade is a crust of light. Monet signed and dated it "Claude Monet 94" at lower left.

Look closely at the surface. The paint is so thick and so worked over that it has a texture like stone itself, a granular, encrusted skin of overlapping touches. The carved detail of the facade is not drawn at all; it is suggested by changes in color.

Where and when it was painted

Monet worked in Rouen, the Norman capital on the Seine downstream from Giverny, in two long campaigns, from February to April 1892 and again from February to April 1893. He rented rooms in buildings on the square opposite the west front and painted the facade from upstairs windows, working on many canvases at once and moving from one to the next as the sun moved round. He found the work exhausting; in a letter he described a night of nightmares in which the cathedral fell on him, appearing blue, then pink, then yellow.

He finished the paintings in his studio at Giverny in 1894, which is why many, including this one, are dated 1894. Twenty of the canvases were shown at Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris in May 1895. The series numbers more than thirty pictures, from three slightly different viewpoints. For the whole series, see Monet's Rouen Cathedral series.

How it was painted

This canvas belongs to the group that includes the Tour d'Albane at the left, seen slightly obliquely, rather than the frontal views of the portal alone. Compare the brilliant Orsay canvases Rouen Cathedral in Full Sunlight and Rouen Cathedral, Effects of Morning Light, and Rouen Cathedral in Sunlight at the Clark. Here the noon light flattens everything: there are no long shadows to model the porches, and the whole facade becomes a single, nearly uniform field of pale color.

The palette avoids pure white entirely. The brightest areas are cream and pale yellow, and their brightness comes from the blues and lilacs placed next to them. At 101 by 65 centimeters, the canvas follows the consistent upright format Monet used throughout the series.

When the paintings were shown in 1895, the critic and politician Georges Clemenceau, Monet's friend, wrote a front-page article urging the state to buy the whole series and keep it together. It did not, and the canvases scattered to collections in France, the United States, Russia and elsewhere. Seeing one in Moscow means seeing a fragment of a sequence that Monet meant to be read as a whole.

Ownership and where to see it

The painting was bought by the Moscow merchant and collector Sergei Shchukin, one of the great early patrons of Monet, Matisse and Picasso. After the Russian Revolution his collection was nationalized and became part of the State Museum of New Western Art in Moscow; when that museum was dissolved in 1948 the picture went to the Pushkin Museum (inventory Ж-3313). The Pushkin also has Rouen Cathedral, Evening, a warm late-afternoon view from the same series. See where to see Monet's paintings and the Claude Monet page.