The Church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois

What you are looking at

The late-Gothic front of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois fills the left and center of the canvas: a steep slate roof, a great rose window in the west gable, a pinnacled porch with pointed arches below, and pale stone warmed by spring sun. To the right a row of tall Parisian apartment buildings, cream and grey with mansard roofs and clusters of chimney pots, recedes along the street. In front of the church a line of chestnut trees in fresh leaf, some with white candles of blossom, shades the square.

Beneath the trees a crowd of tiny figures fills the sunlit pavement: men in top hats, women in light dresses with parasols, a few children, open carriages and cabs drawn up at left. Each figure throws a short, dark shadow, which tells us the sun is high. Above, the sky is a clear, even blue with no cloud at all. The church sits a little left of center, balanced by the bulk of the apartment blocks at right, and the signature is at lower right.

Claude Monet painted this view in the spring of 1867. It measures 79 by 98 centimeters, is number 84 in Wildenstein's catalogue, and belongs to the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

Where and when

In April 1867 Monet, then 26, obtained permission from the Louvre's administration to paint from the museum, and he set up on the balcony of the east front, Claude Perrault's colonnade, looking out over the city rather than at the old masters inside. From there he painted three views: this one, looking east across the Place du Louvre at the church; Quai du Louvre, looking along the river; and The Garden of the Infanta, looking south over the garden toward the Left Bank. All three choose the modern city over the museum's treasures, a statement in itself.

It was a hard year. His big figure painting Women in the Garden had just been rejected by the Salon, he was penniless, and Camille was pregnant with their first child, Jean, born that August. These city views were also attempts to make saleable pictures of a Paris that was hosting the Universal Exhibition that spring.

How it was painted

The church is drawn with care; Monet was not yet painting buildings as dissolving light, as he would in the Rouen Cathedral series a quarter of a century later. Look at the rose window and the porch: their tracery is built from small, precise touches of grey and white, and the shadows inside the arches are a warm violet-brown.

But the crowd is something new. The figures are single strokes, dark against the bright pavement, and from the high viewpoint they become a pattern of movement rather than a set of individuals. That way of painting a crowd anticipates The Boulevard des Capucines six years later.

Notice the shadows under the trees, a band of cool blue-violet that separates the bright square from the bright façade, and the trees themselves, painted as soft masses of light and dark green with the blossom picked out in thick white dabs. The sky is laid flat, in even, horizontal strokes, as a foil for all the detail below.

The building

Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois was the parish church of the kings when they lived in the Louvre. According to tradition its bell gave the signal for the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572. Its porch dates from the fifteenth century, and the church had just been restored in the 1840s and 1850s, while Haussmann's works cleared the square in front of it. Monet shows none of that history, only a sunny morning in the newly opened space.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Alte Nationalgalerie on Berlin's Museum Island, one of the first museums anywhere to collect French Impressionism, under its director Hugo von Tschudi from 1896. The museum also owns Monet's later Houses at Argenteuil and Fields of Bezons. For other collections, see where to see Monet's paintings, and for the artist, Claude Monet.