Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, Sunlight

What you are looking at

The west front of Rouen Cathedral fills the canvas from edge to edge, so close that the towers are cut off at the sides and the spires at the top. The stone is drenched in sun. Monet paints it in creams, chalky whites and pale butter yellow, with shadows not of gray or brown but of clear sky blue and lilac. Above the gables a strip of strong blue sky shows through the openwork pinnacles. In the center, the great rose window holds a soft mauve and rose, and just below it the clock dial is a small round knot of pale paint.

At the bottom, the three doorways are flushed with warm pink and orange, the deepest color in the picture, because the sun has not yet reached into the recesses. Look at the lower left corner: three tiny dark figures stand at the foot of the façade, a few flicks of blue-black paint. They are almost the only reminder of scale, and they make the cathedral feel enormous.

Monet signed and dated the canvas Claude Monet 94 at lower right.

Rouen, 1892–93

Claude Monet went to Rouen in February 1892 and again in February 1893, renting rooms in buildings on the square opposite the cathedral's west front. He worked on many canvases at once, switching as the light moved across the façade, and returned to Giverny with the pictures unfinished. Through 1894 he reworked them in his studio, which is why so many, including this one, bear the date '94.

The result was the Rouen Cathedral series, some thirty canvases. Twenty were shown at Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris in May 1895, where Georges Clemenceau praised them in print as a revolution in painting, and Pissarro and Cézanne went to see them.

How it was painted

The surface is the famous Rouen crust: paint laid on in thick, dry, overlapping touches, then dragged and scumbled so that each new color catches on the ridges of the layer beneath. Up close it resembles weathered stone more than a picture of stone. Monet keeps the drawing loose. The tracery of the gables is a row of pale vertical dabs, the statues of the portal a ripple of blue and white.

The color logic is that of full sun. Light surfaces become nearly white and lose their local color; shadows take on the blue of the sky that fills them. Monet used no black. Even the deepest accents, the figures and the cracks in the stone, are dark blue.

How this version differs

There are several sunlit portals in the series. The Met's Rouen Cathedral: The Portal (Sunlight) is warmer, with apricot stone and a deeper blue sky. The Marmottan's Portal, Sunlight, End of the Day turns the façade orange and gold. The Musée d'Orsay's Rouen Cathedral in Full Sunlight shows the portal with the tower and harder midday shadows. The Washington canvas is the palest and coolest of these, the stone almost dissolved into white light, and it is one of the few to include figures.

The National Gallery of Art owns a second canvas from the series, Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, a softer, grayer view hung in the same collection, which makes Washington one of the best places to compare two moments of light side by side.

Reading the light

The west front of Rouen Cathedral faces roughly west, so in late winter it receives direct sun only from early afternoon. The bleached stone here therefore points to a fairly late hour, when the sun was high enough in the southwest to strike the whole façade but not yet low enough to turn it gold. The figures at the bottom, already in the shade of the portal, confirm that the lowest part of the façade has not yet been reached.

Ownership and where to see it

Catalogued as Wildenstein 1324, the painting is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (accession 1963.10.179), as part of the Chester Dale Collection, bequeathed by the New York collector Chester Dale in 1962. It is usually on view in the West Building's French galleries. For other versions, see our guide to where to see Monet's paintings.