Rouen Cathedral at Noon
Claude Monet (1840 to 1926) · 1894
The west front of Rouen Cathedral fills the canvas from edge to edge, so close that the sky is almost squeezed out at the top. It is midday, and the sun bleaches the stone to cream and gold while the deep porches sink into blue and violet shadow. The Gothic carving, the rose window and the pinnacles are all there, but they dissolve as you approach into a crust of dabs and scrapes of paint. Monet is not painting a building; he is painting the light that falls on it at one particular hour.
Between 1892 and 1894 he rented rooms opposite the cathedral and worked on some thirty canvases at once, moving from one to the next as the light changed, sometimes every half hour. Look at the surface of this one: the paint is thick and dry, layered over months in the studio until it has the texture of weathered stone. The colours are not local colours at all but the colours of light, and the picture only pulls into focus when you step well back. The museum also owns the evening version of the same view, in which the facade turns pink and the shadows go blue, and hanging them together is the whole point of the series.
Both were bought by the Moscow textile magnate Sergei Shchukin, who began collecting the Impressionists in the 1890s when they were still shocking. His mansion in Moscow became a private museum open to visitors on Sundays, and after the revolution his collection was nationalised and eventually divided between the Hermitage and the Pushkin. The Rouen Cathedrals are among the works that convinced Moscow artists of the Silver Age that painting could be about colour alone.
Did You Know? Monet complained that the cathedral was killing him and that he dreamed of it collapsing on him in shades of blue, pink and yellow.
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