Rouen Cathedral, Portal, Morning Sun

The west front of Rouen Cathedral looks out over the square toward the setting sun. In the morning the light comes from behind the building, so the carved stone stands in its own shade. That is what Monet laid down here, in blues and chalky whites, with only a few warm touches around the doorways. The Orsay's title adds the words Harmonie bleue. It is one of five of his Rouen canvases in the museum. Count Isaac de Camondo, a banker and collector, bought it directly from Monet in September 1894 and left it to the Louvre in 1911. In 1969 the American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein made his own series of the façade, working from black-and-white photographs of Monet's paintings and printing them as fields of dots. In 2011 this canvas travelled to Boston and Los Angeles to hang beside them.