Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, Sunlight

Claude Monet

National Gallery of Art

We look up at the exterior of a church that soars the height of this vertical painting. The church is painted with visible dabs and strokes of sky blue, cream white, golden tan, and a few touches of pale, shell pink to create a blurred look, as if seeing a reflection in the rippling surface of a puddle. The church façade is angled to our left, away from us. The main door and its surround takes up the center of the composition, where a rectangular door is set within nested, pointed arches that lead up to a narrow, tall, triangular gable. The point of that gable overlaps the round rose window, which is the same width as the portal surround below. Spires flank the central section and rise steeply off the top edge of the painting. The sky above is painted as a field of pale lapis blue. A few dabs of darker blue and green suggest people, tiny in scale, standing near the lower left corner. The artist signed and dated the lower right, “Claude Monet ‘94.”