History Notes Special: Monet’s Rouen Cathedral Series

One thing that has annoyed this writer for many years now, is Monet’s series of the Rouen Cathedral. The paintings are spread out, 30 of them (32 if you count the ones with the houses), in various museums around the world. I know it’s a futile request, but a show that includes the entire series together would be an act of extreme artistic intelligence. For modernists, Monet exposed how the character and shape of an object changed, according to the light, at different times of the day and the year. His series of Poplars, Haystacks, Waterlilies and Rouen Cathedral, each of which featured repetitive views of the same subject under different lighting conditions. The gothic cathedral is his most ambitious attempt to illustrate the evanescence of things, the transitory nature…of things.

Moving from one canvas to another as each day progressed, as each day’s light changed, he painted the facade with highly textured brushstrokes that convey the aspect of sculpted stone. Monet later finished the works in his studio at Giverny, carefully adjusting the pictures both independently and in relation to each other, and to time..