Rouen
Cathedral in Full Sunlight
- Harmony in Blue and Gold
(oil on canvas, 1893)
Musée
d'Orsay, Paris
Townscapes
Claude
Monet was one of a group of painters who created the style
of art called 'Impressionism'.
The name 'Impressionism' was a sarcastic tag attached
to one of his paintings, 'Impression: Sunrise' (1873)
in a review by Louis Leroy in the satirical magazine 'Le
Charivari' (25th April 1874).
Impressionist
painters tried to capture the quality of light and atmosphere
of a subject under particular lighting or weather conditions.
The Impressionist’s painting technique allowed artists
to create colours and tones that had more natural appearance
than anything achieved by traditional methods of painting.
The
Impressionists rejected the old idea that the shadow of
an object was made up from the colour of the object with
some brown or black added. They avoided the use of brown
and black. The range of colours Monet used was drawn from
the spectrum.
He did not mix up his colours before he painted them,
but broke them down into their separate hues
and then painted them in small strokes of pure colour
next to each other. For example, if he was painting a
green object he would paint strokes of yellow and blue
together which, on being viewed from a distance, would
form a green in the eye of the spectator. Another technique
he used was to tint his shadows with complementary
(opposite) colours to give them more vitality. For
example, in this painting of 'Rouen Cathedral in Full
Sunlight' he creates the brown shadows of the building
by painting strokes of yellow and red to make orange and
then darkens them with spots of blue. All this is done
with strokes of pure unmixed colours which blend in the
eye of the viewer.
Impressionist
painting also had its disadvantages. It was difficult
to paint in a detailed manner as the paint was applied
in thick brushstrokes and the artist had to work very
quickly to capture the changing effects of the light or
weather conditions. If we were to look at a photograph
of Rouen Cathedral we would see that it had very detailed
Gothic facade. In his painting, Monet had to simplify
this to try to capture the hazy atmosphere created by
the strong sunlight. To achieve the luminous effects of
sunlight, he mixed his colours with white rather than
using them straight from the tube. The surface quality
of this work is a heavy, but evenly textured pattern of
brushstrokes which suggest the natural texture of the
weathered sandstone.
Monet's
Painting in Series
Rouen
Cathedral - (sun effect) 1892
Rouen
Cathedral - (morning fog) 1893
Rouen
Cathedral - (twilight) 1894
As
Monet was primarily interested in the effect of light
on his subjects, he often painted the same scene under
different lighting and atmospheric conditions. Rouen Cathedral
was one of these subjects that he painted in such a series.
When the series was finally completed in 1895, some twenty
canvases were hung together in an exhibition, showing
the passage of time from dawn to dusk. The painter, Camille
Pissarro, was struck by their originality and wrote to
his son, "I am sorry you will not be here before
Monet's exhibition closes; his Cathedrals will be scattered
here and there and they should be seen as a whole."
Claude
Monet Notes
