Claude Oscar Monet

impressionism

Claude Monet Paintings 1840 - 1926 French Prominent Impressionist Painter

Rouen Cathedral , 1893

Oil on canvas

Private collection

City Landscapes

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OIL PAINTING: Rouen Cathedral , 1893
"Everything changes, even stone." Claude Monet wrote these words in a letter and vividly demonstrated them in paint, conveying a wondrous combination of permanence and mutability as the sun daily transformed the facade of Rouen Cathedral. Extending the building's encrusted stone surface to the richly varied impasto surface of his painting, he portrayed the cathedral perpetually re-emerging in the suffused light of early morning.
Monet created several groups of paintings exploring the color, light, and form of a single subject at various times of day, but his Rouen Cathedral series was his most intense effort on a single site. He painted there in late winter in both 1892 and 1893, then reworked his thirty oil paintings from memory in the studio through 1894. He began this example in 1893, working in an improvised studio in the front room of a dressmaker's shop across from the Rouen cathedral.