The Portal of Rouen Cathedral in Morning Light

What you are looking at

It is early morning in Rouen, and the sun, coming from the southeast behind the cathedral, has not yet reached the west front. The whole façade is in shadow, painted in purplish blue, lavender and gray-violet. Only a few edges catch the light: thin vertical slivers of pale pink and yellow run down the Tour Saint-Romain at the left and a smaller tower at the right, as raking sun grazes their corners. The sky, visible only as a pale, jagged wedge between the towers, is a creamy off-white.

In the center, the great rose window above the central portal is a dark, rounded hollow, and the pointed gable in front of it stands out as a thin pale triangle. At its base the clock dial holds a small orange spark. The three portals at the bottom are almost indistinct, a soft blur of mauve and blue with a faint warmth in the central door.

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

Rouen, 1892–94

Claude Monet painted the cathedral during two stays in Rouen. In 1892 he worked first from an apartment at 31 place de la Cathédrale and then from an improvised studio in a shop at number 23. In 1893 he rented rooms above Édouard Mauquit's novelty shop at 81 rue du Grand-Pont, near the southwest corner of the square, which took in more of the Saint-Romain tower. The Getty's canvas shares that southwestern view with ten others begun there in early 1893. He completed the series at Giverny, dating most canvases 1894.

Monet showed twenty cathedrals at Durand-Ruel's gallery from May 10 to 31, 1895. This one was number 13, titled Le portail (Effet du matin). See the Rouen Cathedral series.

How it was painted

The Getty notes how Monet combined thick impasto with thinner, scumbled passages, dragging dry paint over earlier layers so that the colors beneath show through. In the upper façade the paint is heaped up into a rough, granular crust; in the sky and the lower portal it is thinner and smoother. The palette is nearly monochrome, built from blues and violets, with the pinks and yellows held back for the few lit edges.

The canvas is about 100 by 65 centimeters, the size shared by eighteen pictures in the series, which Monet seems to have intended as a matched set.

How this version differs

The Folkwang's The Portal, Morning Fog shares the purplish-blue key but is softer and mistier, the building nearly dissolved. The Orsay's Portal, Morning Sun (Harmonie bleue) shows a slightly later moment, with the doorways already warm. The Goulandris Foundation's Rouen Cathedral in the Morning (Pink Dominant) sees the same hour in pinker light. The Getty picture is the most purely shadowed of these, a façade still waiting for the sun, with only the slivers on the towers to say that day has begun.

Looking closely

The slivers of light on the towers are a good place to start. They are painted in single, narrow strokes of pink and pale yellow, laid on top of the blue shadow, and they are the brightest marks on the canvas. Notice too how the pale sky wedge is cut by the jagged pinnacles of the gables, which Monet outlines with short blue strokes.

Ownership and where to see it

After the 1895 exhibition the painting was sold through Durand-Ruel to Louis Gonse, the critic, art historian and editor who also owned Monet's The Bay of Antibes. Catalogued as Wildenstein 1354, it entered the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2001 (accession 2001.33) and hangs in the paintings galleries at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. It is one of the few Rouen Cathedrals on the American West Coast. See our guide to where to see Monet's paintings.