Rouen Cathedral, Portal, Sunlight (W 1322)

What you are looking at

The sun has just come round onto the west front of Rouen Cathedral. The upper façade, the gables, pinnacles and towers, is almost white, painted in cream, ivory and pale yellow with thin blue lines in the crevices. Above, a deep, saturated blue sky fills the gaps between the spires. The lower half of the building is warmer: the great rose window above the central portal is a rounded hollow of rust and violet, and the three doorways at the bottom glow orange and red, as if the stone inside the porches were reflecting the heat.

The effect is of a strong, raking early-afternoon light that bleaches the projecting surfaces and fires up the recesses. The pale, thin lines of the gable cross the dark rose window in a sharp triangle, and the small clock dial below it is a bright yellow point. At the right edge, the side portal and the base of the Tour de Beurre are washed in pink.

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

Rouen, 1892–94

Claude Monet painted the cathedral in two campaigns, February to April 1892 and the same months of 1893, from rooms facing the façade. Wikidata dates this canvas to the first campaign; a Commons description titles it the portal in early afternoon. Like the whole group it was finished at Giverny in 1894. Twenty cathedrals were exhibited at Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris in 1895. See the Rouen Cathedral series.

How it was painted

The surface is the dense, crusty paste of the series, but the handling is lively, with vertical strokes of white and cream dragged over blue and pink so that the lit stone seems to vibrate. The deep blue sky is laid in more smoothly and frames the pale building like a background of enamel. Monet uses the oranges and reds of the portals as the counterweight to the cool sky, a classic complementary pairing.

How this version differs

It belongs to the group of sunlit portals. The National Gallery of Art's West Façade, Sunlight is paler and more uniformly white; the Met's The Portal (Sunlight) is warmer and more apricot; the MFA Boston's Rouen Cathedral, Façade is golden. This canvas has the strongest contrast between bleached upper stories and fiery portals, and the most intense blue sky, much like the deep-blue sky of the privately owned Rouen Cathedral (W 1361).

Looking closely

The paint is thickest in the upper façade, where white and cream are heaped over earlier layers of blue and pink; in raking light the ridges cast tiny shadows of their own. In the portals the touches turn into longer strokes of orange and red laid side by side, so the doors seem to flicker. Monet signs in dark blue at the lower left, the same blue he uses for the deepest crevices of the stone.

Ownership and where to see it

Catalogued as Wildenstein 1322, the painting is in a private collection, and its size and ownership history are not published in accessible sources. To see sunlit portals in museums, visit the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Met in New York, the MFA Boston or the Musée d'Orsay. See our guide to where to see Monet's paintings.