Monet: Painting Light

In the 1890s, Monet completed a series of more than 30 paintings of Rouen Cathedral, a Gothic cathedral in France with great sculptural detail on its façade. He rented a hotel room across the street from the cathedral and set up a series of easels so he could move from one to the next as the light changed throughout the day. The painting to the right captures the light on the cathedral at dawn. Monet painted with loose brushstrokes and soft, atmospheric edges. The image is hazy and little detail is visible on the pastel surface of the building.

Monet uses a delicate, cool palette, using blue, purple and green, to create deep shadows near the base of the cathedral. The sun has just touched the highest points of the façade, and Monet highlights these areas with warm orange. This varied palette shows the wide range of color in the early-morning light.

In this painting, right, Monet captures the same cathedral at noon, when the light is directly overhead and the contrast between the highlights and shadows is the most dramatic. Monet uses creamy white and soft yellow to paint the parts of the cathedral that are in direct sunlight. He uses cool purples for the shadowed areas created by doors and windows. The result is a painting with more texture and detail than the one completed in the early-morning haze, when the light creates little contrast.

The French Academy favored paintings with smooth surfaces, but Impressionists often used thick, chunky layers of paint, a technique called impasto. This layering of paint not only gives the colors a deep richness, but it also casts real shadows across the canvas when exposed to light.

In the version to the right Monet uses orange and blue to create the vibrant contrasts made by the setting sun. The upper half of the cathedral is still bathed in intense late-afternoon sunlight. The lower half is painted in cool blues and purples, with a few orange highlights, showing that it is now almost fully in shadow.

Each of these three paintings shows the same cathedral, but the images are very different from one another. To learn more about how light and color change over time, try an experiment like Monet’s at home. Create a painting or take a photograph of a tree or other object on your street at different times each day for a week. You will be amazed at the results!