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Claude Monet (artist) French, 1840 - 1926 Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, 1894 oil on canvas Overall: 100.1 x 65.9 cm (39 3/8 x 25 15/16 in.) framed: 121.6 x 88.3 cm (47 7/8 x 34 3/4 in.) Chester Dale Collection 1963.10.49 |
Object 3 of 7
He brought the cathedral paintings back to his home in Giverny (about half-way between Paris and Rouen) and worked on them laboriously in the studio. Heavily painted surfaces show him struggling at times to finish these paintings, to harmonize them as a group. Monet conceived of them together and did not consider that any one of them was complete until all were finished. He finally exhibited twenty of them in Paris in 1895. This collectiveness suggests that Monet’s aims were no longer to simply record his sensory experience, but to explore light and color more deliberately as purely artistic concerns and as expressions of mood. He was seeking, he wrote a friend while working on the cathedral series, “more serious qualities.”
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