Rouen Cathedral
Stories behind the Works of Art
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The Portal of Rouen Cathedral in Morning Light, Harmony in Blue (1894). Claude Monet
Impressionism tries to capture the instant, the impression, the way in which our eye briefly perceives things thanks to light and atmospheric conditions.
Monet, to take that search to the extreme, had the idea of developing series. Series in which he represented the same place or the same things at different times of the day. So he painted the series of the haystacks and the series of the famous water lilies. And between both, the cathedrals.
Those works, which were so important for Impressionism, turned out to be the start of abstraction.
Some people consider that the water lilies (due to the absence of recognizable shapes at certain times, since they are pure color) are the beginning of abstraction. Nevertheless, Kandinsky, the “conscious” initiator of the abstraction, realized that “an object can be represented without being specifically painted” when he saw a haystack by Monet and had to read the catalogue to understand what the work was about. That experience was so decisive for him that he suggested that that work should be considered as the first abstract painting.
The series of the facade of the Cathedral of Rouen is considered the highest point of Impressionism. It would be something like “Impressionism in its pure state.”
Monet shows us a Gothic cathedral at different times of the day, with several light conditions and diverse atmospheric effects.
But of course, it is impossible to paint so fast as to capture the instant. Monet used to work in several paintings at the same time. And when it was the time of the day represented in one of those paintings, he would work in that painting. When it was the time of the day represented in another, he would work in that other painting. And so he progressed.
It was a difficult, titanic job, in which results were seen after a long time. The whole enterprise took Monet two years. He obtained 5 different points of view, 31 canvases in total, many of which he had to finish in his workshop, by heart.
Ultimately, the cathedral is just an excuse to show the true protagonist of the composition (and of all the pictorial works, according to Monet): light. Light is capable of giving life to something inanimate —and paradoxically gloomy— as the façade of a gothic cathedral can be.
Light invents color again.
And Monet said some time before undertaking the task of painting the series: “The older I become the more I realize of that I have to work very hard to reproduce what I search: the instantaneous. The influence of the atmosphere on the things and the light scattered throughout.”
Recommended links:
Characteristic Elements of Impressionist Painting.
Impression, Sunrise (1872), Claude Monet.
The Last Paintings of Monet: a Touch of Expressionism?
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1 Comment
Neil · 14 February, 2022 at 12:21 pm
Monet, Cezanne, Rodin… speechless in the face of this trinity.