Rouen Cathedral, Portal and Tower Saint-Romain in the Sun

Monet came back to Rouen for a second run at the cathedral in February 1893, and the room he had used the year before was no longer free. A draper on the square let him work upstairs in his lingerie and fashion shop, beside the fitting room, until customers objected to the bearded man at the window and a screen was put up between him and the shop floor. The canvas is signed 94 because he went on with it at Giverny, long after the light in it had gone. Durand-Ruel showed 20 of the series in Paris in May 1895, and Georges Clemenceau, out of parliament then and writing for a daily paper, gave most of a front page to urging the state to buy the whole set. It did not. This one reached the national collections in 1911, in the bequest of the collector Isaac de Camondo.