Rouen Cathedral, Morning Fog
Claude Monet
CLAUDE MONET, 1894. OIL ON CANVAS.
Over two years, Monet painted the same facade of the Rouen Cathedral thirty different times. Viewed in their totality, these paintings capture the building from dawn to dusk, examining the changing shape of the architecture as the sun moves across it. This type of painting was not uncommon for Monet; he obsessively documented scenes over and over, trying to capture the extreme present, and would change canvases as the sun moved across the sky. His loyalty was to light and he strove to capture it as accurately as possible. Yet, his work with the Rouen Cathedral feels different, for even in it’s most clear there is an ethereality to it - the grand, circular window that seems to open like a portal into another world regardless of how the sun falls. It epitomises the relationship between painting and architecture at its best, an artist’s eye that can see in a building the infinity of its variation, can interpret the work of one craftsman to another. It forces us to refocus, not just on the Rouen Cathedral and Monet’s depictions, but on the buildings around us, and the ease at which they transform across the day.