Rouen Cathedral

In 1892 Monet rented a room across the square from Rouen Cathedral and painted its west front over and over, several canvases going at once, swapping them as the light moved through the day. He kept about 30 of these facades, reworked them in his Giverny studio, and showed 20 together in Paris in 1895. This is one of them, caught in warm late-afternoon light that turns the stone reddish. What is unexpected is where it hangs now. It reached Belgrade through Erich Šlomović, a young collector from Yugoslavia who came to Paris in the 1930s and worked alongside the dealer Ambroise Vollard. As war approached he brought part of his collection home. Šlomović was murdered in 1942, at 27, and the paintings he had gathered eventually passed to the National Museum of Serbia, where this Rouen facade has stayed far from the city Monet was looking at.