This painting of Rouen Cathedral was produced by Claude Monet in 1892 and is now displayed at the National Museum of Serbia. It forms part of a series of more than thirty paintings in which Monet repeatedly depicted the cathedral’s western façade under different light and weather conditions. Having already produced an increasingly comprehensive collection of posts about individual objects in this museum, I was reassured to discover that one of the world’s most celebrated artists had essentially done the same building more than thirty times. Compared with Monet, I have shown admirable editorial restraint.
Monet rented rooms opposite the cathedral and moved between several canvases as the light changed during the day. The architecture remained in place, which was considerate of it, but its appearance continually shifted as sunlight, mist and shadow moved across the stone. The cathedral is therefore less the true subject than the light falling upon it, explaining why parts of the building appear hazy or almost dissolved. In all honesty, I’m not sure that I would have paid much attention to this painting if Monet’s name had not appeared beside it.
This particular version was acquired in 1939 for the Prince Paul Museum, one of the institutions from which the present National Museum of Serbia developed. Its presence in Belgrade is an indication of the ambition with which European art was collected in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and it was a rather unexpected painting to encounter here. Rather annoyingly, it demonstrated that producing dozens of variations on one subject can amount to a distinguished artistic project, so I now feel entirely justified in the museum posts but this is the last one for the moment….