Rouen Cathedral: The Portal (Sunlight)

What you are looking at

The west front of Rouen Cathedral faces us squarely, its central portal and great arch at the middle of the canvas, its side towers sliced off by the frame. The sun is full on the stone, and Monet paints it in warm creams, biscuit, apricot and pale gold. The shadows are blue and violet, laid in as short vertical dashes that run down the buttresses and across the tracery like rain. At the top, a deep, even blue sky shows between the pinnacles, the strongest blue in the picture, and makes the warm stone glow.

The center of the picture is the great rose window over the main door, a dark, rounded cavity of plum and violet. Below it the clock dial is a small, bright circle of yellow and cream. At the very bottom the central door burns orange and yellow, as if the sunlight had pooled inside it, and the side portal at right falls into a warm, reddish shade.

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

Rouen, 1892–94

Claude Monet spent the late winter and spring of 1892 and 1893 in Rouen, painting the cathedral from rented rooms across the square. He worked on many canvases at once, switching between them as the light moved over the façade during the day. Back at Giverny he reworked the whole group through 1894 to bring them into harmony with one another, and dated most of them that year.

Twenty canvases from the Rouen Cathedral series were shown at Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris in May 1895. Critics were divided, but fellow painters were impressed, and Georges Clemenceau, then a journalist, wrote that the series amounted to a revolution.

How it was painted

The canvas has the thick, encrusted surface typical of the series. Monet built it up in many layers, letting each dry before dragging stiff paint across the ridges below, so the colors interlock rather than blend. The effect up close is of rough, sun-warmed stone; from a distance the façade seems to vibrate.

Notice how little drawing there is. The gables are a row of jagged peaks, the statues a scatter of blue strokes, the tracery a lattice of verticals. Monet is painting the envelope of light around the building, as he put it, rather than the building itself.

How this version differs

Several canvases in the series show the portal in sun. The National Gallery of Art's Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, Sunlight is paler and cooler, the stone bleached almost to white. The Clark's Rouen Cathedral in Sunlight is softer and pinker. The Met's canvas is the warmest and most saturated of the three, with the most intense blue sky and the strongest contrast between golden stone and violet shadow. It reads like early afternoon, the sun high enough to light the whole façade but already slanting into the doorways.

The Musée d'Orsay's Rouen Cathedral in Full Sunlight is the closest match in mood, though it takes in the tower at left.

A cathedral in New York

Theodore M. Davis left the Met a large collection that included old masters and Impressionist paintings as well as Egyptian antiquities. His Rouen Cathedral was one of the earliest canvases from the series to enter an American museum, and it helped establish the Met's strength in Monet's work of the 1890s. It hangs near the museum's Haystacks and Poplars, so a visitor can see all three of the great series of that decade in a single room or two.

Ownership and where to see it

Catalogued as Wildenstein 1325, the painting belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 30.95.250). It came from the collection of Theodore M. Davis, the American lawyer and collector best known for sponsoring excavations in Egypt's Valley of the Kings. Davis bequeathed it in 1915, and it entered the museum's collection in 1930 with the rest of his bequest. It hangs in the Met's nineteenth-century European paintings galleries. See our guide to Monet at the Met.