Rouen Cathedral, Façade

One night in April 1892, after weeks spent facing the west front of Rouen Cathedral, Monet dreamed that the building was falling on top of him, and that it was blue, or pink, or yellow. He described the dream in a letter to Alice Hoschedé, whom he would marry that summer, and told her he was worn out and could not go on. Soon afterwards, discouraged, he packed up the canvases and took them home to Giverny. He returned to Rouen the following winter and went on painting the façade from rooms across the square, moving from canvas to canvas as the light travelled over the stone. The real finishing came later, in his studio at Giverny, where he reworked the whole group of some 30 cathedral pictures. The Museum of Fine Arts points to what that reworking left behind, dry paint built up thickly, layer over layer, rough like weathered stone, so that the surface takes in and gives back light much as the cathedral walls do. He signed this canvas at the lower left and dated it 94. It stayed with him until 1907, and in 1917 it came to Boston.