Cathedral: The Portal (Sunlight), 1894.
Oil on canvas, 99.7 × 65.7 cm.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, Sunlight, 1894.
Oil on canvas, 100.1 × 65.8 cm.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Rouen Cathedral, Full Sunlight: Harmony in Blue and Gold, 1893. Oil on canvas,
107 × 73.5 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
It is justifiable to ask whether in Haystacks and his other series of the 1890s Monet was deviating from Impressionism. The answer would seem to be that he was not.
He was simply paying attention primarily to the rendering of light, one of the cardinal problems of Impressionism. This was how painters and critics close to Monet understood his new works, acknowledging the talent they revealed.
When Durand-Ruel exhibited the Rouen Cathedral series in 1895, the friends of Monet’s youth accepted it, albeit not without certain reservations. Pissarro wrote to his son: “The Cathedrals are criticised by many, but praised by, among others, Degas, Renoir, and me. I so wanted you to see them all together, for I find in them the magnificent unity towards which I myself so aspire.” Shortly before this, Pissarro had informed his son that Cézanne liked the Cathedrals.
The idea of creating the series came to Monet in 1892 whilst he was staying in Rouen, where, enchanted by the cathedral, he lodged directly opposite it. From the window of his room he could see not the whole building but only the portal, and this determined the composition of the canvasses in the first part of the cycle.
In these the artist’s field of vision is invariably limited to the portal and the patch of sky above it. It is a ‘close-up’ composition with a part of the cathedral, transformed by the skilled hands of mason and sculptor into stone lacework, occupying the entire area of the canvas. Previously, looking from a cliff, a hill, or the window of a room, he liked to impart a sense of space by leaving the foreground free.
Now the subject was almost approached to point-blank range, and yet its proximity did not help to elucidate its nature, for light reduced it to next to nothing.
The other part of the cycle was produced in 1893 during a second visit to Rouen, when Monet took with him the canvasses he had already executed, intending to add the finishing touches to them.
He again studied the movement of light across the portal and, when he saw the effect he wanted, finished the work he had begun a year earlier; where the moment from the past did not recur, he took a fresh canvas and started again from scratch.
Rouen Cathedral, the Portal, Morning Sun: Harmony in Blue, 1893.
Oil on canvas, 92.2 × 63 cm. Bequest of Comte Isaac de
Camondo to the Louvre, 1911. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
Rouen Cathedral: Setting Sun, 1892–1894.
Oil on canvas, 100 × 65 cm.
National Museum Wales, Cardiff.
During this second visit Monet did not only paint the cathedral from the viewpoint he had used in 1892; he rented another apartment as well, one which enjoyed a slightly different view of the building. From here a considerable portion of Saint-Romain’s tower was visible to the left of the entrance, and also some houses situated close to the tower.
On both his first and second visits Monet turned to his Cathedrals with an enthusiasm which bordered on frenzy. “I am worn out, I can’t go on”, he wrote to his wife in 1892. “And, something that I have never experienced before, I have spent a night filled with nightmarish dreams: the cathedral kept falling on me, and at times it seemed blue, at others pink, at others yellow.”
The following words come from a letter dated 1893: “I am painting like a madman, but no matter what you all say I am quite played out and am now good for nothing else.”
What is known of the creation of the Rouen Cathedral series and other pictures of these years makes it clear that Monet could now not only paint on the spot, but could continue work in his workshop, then return to paintings on location, and then again add finishing touches in the studio.
Monet had worked in the studio previously, although to all questions put to him on this point he invariably replied that nature was his workshop, but with the years, work in the studio became increasingly important for the artist.
It is unlikely that the canvasses executed in Rouen in 1892 remained untouched in Giverny, and it is certain that after his return from the second visit to Rouen he was still bringing them to perfection.
One cannot disagree with Pissarro’s judgement that the Rouen Cathedral series must create its strongest impression when all twenty canvasses are collected together – alas, a spectacle almost unrealisable today, since the paintings are scattered among numerous museums and private collections throughout the world.
Best endowed in this respect is the Musée d’Orsay in Paris which holds five paintings: Rouen Cathedral, the West Portal, Dull Weather (1892), Rouen Cathedral, the Portal and the Saint-Romain Tower, Morning Effect: Harmony in White (1893), Rouen Cathedral, the Portal, Morning Sun: Harmony in Blue, Rouen Cathedral, Full Sunlight: Harmony in Blue and Gold, and the cathedral without indication of the time it was painted, Rouen Cathedral, the Portal Seen from the Front: Harmony in Brown (1892).
Rouen Cathedral Façade and Tour d’Albane (Morning Effect), 1894. Oil on canvas,
106.1 × 73.9 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The Doge’s Palace (Le Palais ducal), 1908.
Oil on canvas, 81.3 × 99.1 cm. Brooklyn Museum, New York.
San Giorgio Maggiore, 1908. Oil on canvas,
59.2 × 81.2 cm. National Museum Wales, Cardiff.
The Church of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, 1908.
Oil on canvas, 64.8 × 91.4 cm.
Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis.
The gaze of the visitor to the museum passes quickly from one picture to the next, then returns and runs again across the uneven surface of the canvasses, studying the changes of light. The repeated motif of the portal, painted, moreover, on vertical canvasses of approximately uniform dimensions, recedes, in proportion to the length of time spent in contemplation, further and further into the background, until the viewer is wholly enthralled by the astonishing skill of the painter.
The Rouen Cathedral at Noon and Rouen Cathedral in the Evening (1894, Pushkin Museum, Moscow) carry the intense blue of the sky above, the dark-blue and violet shadows below, and between them a scattering of golden, pink, and slightly lilac tones,
