Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, Sunlight, Claude Monet, 1894. Oil on canvas, 100.1 × 65.8 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Public domain (National Gallery of Art, open access).
The image on this page is a studio placeholder, not the painting. The open-access file from National Gallery of Art, Washington replaces it when the gallery's image pipeline runs — we would rather show you a card that says so than a reproduction we have not verified.
Impressionism
Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, Sunlight
Claude Monet · 1894
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 100.1 × 65.8 cm
- Held by
- National Gallery of Art, Washington
- Licence
- Public domain (National Gallery of Art, open access)
- Movement
- Impressionism
- Country
- France
The painter
Claude Monet
Monet gave Impressionism its name by accident, with a painting called Impression, Sunrise that a hostile critic used as a stick to beat the whole group in 1874. He spent the next fifty years pursuing one idea with more discipline than anyone else of his generation: that a painting records a specific light at a specific moment, and that the way to prove it is to paint the same subject repeatedly under different conditions. Hence the series — the stacks of wheat, the poplars, Rouen cathedral, the Thames, and finally the water lilies, which occupied him for the last twenty-five years of his life.
Nearby
Related works
Impression, Sunrise
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer)
Art Institute of Chicago
Water Lilies
Art Institute of Chicago
What to look at
Monet rented rooms across the square from Rouen cathedral and painted its west front more than thirty times, working on several canvases in rotation and switching whenever the light moved off the one in front of him. The series is the argument: the building never changes, so everything that differs between the canvases is light. In this one the sun is full on the façade and the stone is built from thick, crusted paint in cream, pink, pale blue and gold, applied so heavily that the surface has its own relief independent of the carving it depicts. Stand close and it is a wall of encrusted pigment; step back and the Gothic tracery resolves. The portal at the bottom is deep blue-violet, which is a shadow painted entirely as colour, with no black and no brown anywhere in it.