Thirty Canvases from the Same Window: Monet's Rouen Cathedral Series

About an hour and a half by train northwest of Paris sits the city of Rouen, and its cathedral became the subject of one of Monet's most famous series. Built in the Gothic style, the cathedral is defined by its tall, sharply pointed spires — the tallest reaches 151 meters, making it the tallest cathedral in France.

Monet's reason for choosing it was simple: Rouen was close to his home in Giverny. With a cathedral this striking practically next door, it was natural for a painter to want to take it on as a challenge, and plenty of other artists painted in Rouen around the same time. By then financially comfortable, Monet rented the second floor of a building directly across from the cathedral, set up a studio there, and produced more than thirty paintings of it — hence the term "series." The Musée d'Orsay holds four of them.

Looking closely at those four, you'll notice the composition is nearly identical across all of them. Monet's other series typically show subtle shifts in vantage point from canvas to canvas, resulting in slightly different compositions each time. With Rouen Cathedral, though, he fixed his position from the studio and painted from that exact same spot every time, which is why the composition stays constant. Working indoors also meant he could paint regardless of snow or rain, and as a result, the four paintings make the difference between a clear day's light and an overcast day's light immediately obvious.

Rouen itself dates back to Roman times, a city with more than two thousand years of history, and its old buildings carry real charm along with plenty of stories. It was at the center of the long territorial struggle between England and France, and it's also the place where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. It's about an hour and a half by train from Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris, and from Rouen's own station, Giverny is another forty minutes by train — making it a perfectly manageable day trip for anyone with the time.