Former occupants include Claude Monet who endlessly painted Rouen’s Cathédrale de Notre Dame. The Rouen Cathédrale paintings, more than thirty in all, were made in 1892 and 1893.
It was painted repeatedly by Claude Monet, who was fascinated by the subtle changes of light and color on the Cathédrale’s towering French Gothic facade.
The paintings known as Les Cathédrale of Rouen, exhibited at the Durand-Ruel gallery in the spring of 1895. The series of twenty five huge canvasses, a feat requiring considerable physical endurance and indomitable perseverance.
Each canvas demonstrates the fact that the painter posses eyes marvelously sensitive to the most subtle modulations of light, and capable of the acutest analysis of luminous phenomena.
He painted more than 3o different studies of this frilly Gothic facade at a various times of the day.
Using the psychical building only as a rack upon which to hang light, mist, dusk and shadows, Monet was capturing ‘impressions’.
The paintings of Rouen Cathédrale, in particular, established Monet once and for all as among the greatest of French painters.
Cathédrale de Rouen - Claude Monet
