Claude Monet

Lockdown has made the Impressionist’s series paintings more relevant than ever, says STEVE PILL, who has enlisted leading artists to find out how they were done

- STEVE PILL

If it wasn’t for Claude Monet, many of us would never have given the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Rouen a second thought. Part way between Paris and France’s English-facing coast, it has been built and rebuilt a number of times over the 800 years prior to the Impressionist painter’s first visit in 1892, even briefly becoming the world’s tallest building several years prior to that point.

Yet it took Monet’s multiple depictions – more than 30 in total – of the French cathedral’s west façade for the world to really sit up and take notice. In many cases these weren’t studies, but rather full-scale canvases measuring more than a metre tall. He used every inch of the stretched linen to carve out a very vivid impression of this stately building in pastel hues and dazzling golds.

Look closely at any one of these paintings, now sadly almost all separated out across the globe as far afield as the National Museum of Serbia and Japan’s Pola Museum of Art, and one can see the sheer quantity of oil paint piled up on the surface, every meticulous stroke like a chip into weathered stone.