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Rouen Cathedral (Monet) facts for kids

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Rouen Cathedral, Full Sunlight
RouenCathedral Monet 1894.jpg
Artist Claude Monet
Year 1894 (1894)
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 107 cm × 73.5 cm (42 in × 28.9 in)
Location Musée d'Orsay, Paris

The Rouen Cathedral series is a famous group of paintings by the French artist Claude Monet. He was an impressionist painter, known for capturing how light changes things. In the 1890s, Monet painted the front of Rouen Cathedral many times. Each painting shows the cathedral at different times of day or year. This highlights how light makes the building look different.

Painting the Cathedral: A Series

Monet created more than thirty paintings of the Rouen Cathedral. He painted them in 1892 and 1893 in Rouen, Normandy. He rented rooms across from the cathedral to use as his temporary art studio. Later, in 1894, he worked on the paintings more in his own studio.

In 1895, Monet chose twenty of his best cathedral paintings. He showed them at a gallery in Paris. Eight of these paintings were sold even before the show ended! Other famous artists, like Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne, saw the exhibition. They thought the series was amazing.

At that time, many people in France were becoming more interested in their history and religion. The Rouen Cathedral was a perfect subject. It was built in the beautiful Gothic style. This style was admired across Europe. The cathedral showed the best of French history and culture.

Capturing Light and Time

Monet had always been fascinated by light. He saw how light changes how things look. It changes with the time of day, the season, and even the weather. For Monet, the way light hit something became as important as the thing itself.

He painted many series of artworks. For example, his famous Water Lilies series also shows the same subject many times. Each painting in these series tries to show how light affects what we see. It helps us understand how light changes our view of a place at a certain moment.

A writer named Robert Pelfrey explained Monet's goal. He said that by painting the same thing over and over, Monet could focus on how light made it look. The cathedral itself didn't change. But the way it looked, because of the changing light, was always different.

The cathedral series was not Monet's first series. But it was his most detailed. Before this, Monet mostly painted landscapes. The cathedral was a new kind of subject for him. It helped him show a cool idea: a strong, solid building that looks different all the time because of changing light. Some people wanted the government to buy all the paintings. They wanted to show them together. But this didn't happen, and the paintings were sold separately.

Monet's Painting Technique

Painting the cathedral was very hard for Monet. Michael Howard, who wrote about Impressionism, said Monet had a lot of trouble. He even had nightmares about the cathedral falling on him in different colors. Monet wrote that he was "trying to do the impossible." He found that capturing light, which changes so fast, was extremely difficult.

Monet was good at quickly sketching a scene. Then he would finish the painting later, using his sketch and his memory. For these cathedral paintings, he used thick layers of paint. This made the paintings feel textured, like the stone of the cathedral itself.

Paul Hayes Tucker, who wrote about Monet, described this. He said Monet's amazing skill was not just seeing nature's effects. It was also how he used his paint. The surfaces of these paintings are covered with thick paint. Monet built it up layer by layer, just like the stone blocks of the cathedral's front.

Monet used many colors woven together. He had a sharp eye for detail. He also used a lot of texture in his paint. All these things helped him create paintings that seem to shimmer with light and color. They are true masterpieces, just like the grand cathedral they show.

Gallery

Where to See the Paintings

Many museums around the world own paintings from the Rouen Cathedral series.

In 1994, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen showed sixteen paintings from the series.

The Musée d'Orsay in Paris always has five of these paintings on display.

In 2018, the National Gallery in London had a special show. They displayed five paintings from the series together in one room. This exhibition was called Monet & Architecture. It showed how Monet used buildings to make his art more interesting. This was a rare event. Most museums don't own more than three of these paintings. Also, the paintings from the Musée d'Orsay were not part of this London show.

The five paintings shown in London came from these places:

See also

  • List of paintings by Claude Monet
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