La Cathédrale de Rouen, le portail, temps gris

Monet arrived in Rouen in February 1892, took a room across the square from the cathedral and set himself the west front as his subject. He worked several canvases at once, swapping them as the light moved, which meant waiting for the weather to come back round to a canvas he had already begun. On 24 February he was complaining in a letter about a grey sky that would not lift, and this is one of the canvases that grey weather gave him. By April he was telling Alice Hoschede, whom he married that summer, that he kept dreaming the cathedral was falling on him, and that in the dream it came down blue, or pink, or yellow.