Access Type
Open Access Thesis
Date of Award
January 2014
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
M.A.
Department
Art and Art History
First Advisor
Jennifer Olmsted
Second Advisor
Dora Apel
Abstract
This paper focuses on Monet's Rouen Cathedral paintings, a set of canvases painted by the artist between February 1892 and May 1895. This series has traditionally been hailed as Monet's greatest and most significant, but historical scholarship has addressed the series within an Impressionist framework. However, this paper argues instead that the Cathedral paintings no longer represented Monet as an Impressionist, but instead as an artist with entirely original and different goals for whom the nature of time had taken on new meaning. Where Monet began his endeavors in seriality with a feverish focus on the temporary and elusive - the enveloppe - in Rouen he worked and reworked the canvases, bringing them to a hand-wrought and over-worked surface unprecedented within his own work. For Monet, these paintings did not capture specific moments; they rendered an enduring and overwhelming presence entirely outside of time and place. The Rouen Cathedral series marks a distinct shift in Monet's oeuvre. With these paintings, the artist left behind Impressionism and its focus on the fleeting qualities of atmosphere and light. The Rouen Cathedral works were a declaration of his new grand ambition: to construct paintings that would endure through both their physicality and their timeless subject matter.
Recommended Citation
Winchell, Kaleigh Paige, "From Instantaneities To The Eternal: Shifting Pictorial Temporalities In Monet's Rouen Cathedral" (2014). Wayne State University Theses. 323.
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_theses/323