Image source: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain). View source

Rouen Cathedral: The Portal (Sunlight)

Artist: Claude Monet (1840–1926)
Date: 1894
Dimensions: 99.7 x 65.7 cm
Medium: Oil on canvas
Location: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, United States

This painting shows the Gothic west front of Rouen Cathedral in Normandy, bathed in bright sunlight. It belongs to a series of more than thirty views of the same façade that Monet painted at different times of day and in different weather.

A closer look

Monet rented rooms opposite the cathedral in 1892 and 1893 and worked on many canvases at once, switching from one to the next as the light changed. The stone carvings dissolve into a crust of thick paint in pale yellow, orange, blue and lilac; the real subject is not the building but the light and air between it and the painter. He finished the series in his studio at Giverny. Twenty of the canvases were shown together in Paris in 1895, astonishing visitors.

History of the painting

Monet exhibited twenty of his Rouen Cathedral canvases together at the gallery of his dealer Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1895, and they sold quickly to collectors, many of them American. This version was bought by Theodore M. Davis, a wealthy New York lawyer and amateur Egyptologist who excavated in the Valley of the Kings, and it came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with his bequest in 1915.

More by Claude Monet

About this artist →