Rouen Cathedral - in Art

In Art

The most famous paintings of the cathedral were produced by the Impressionist painter Claude Monet, who painted a large series of paintings of the building, the same scenes at different times of the day and in different weather conditions. Two paintings are in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; one is in the Getty Center in Los Angeles, CA; one is in the National Museum of Serbia in Belgrade; one is in a museum of Cologne; one in the Rouen fine art museum and five in the musée d'Orsay in Paris. The estimated value of one painting is over $40 million. Other painters inspired by the building included John Ruskin, who selected as an example of good architecture in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, and Roy Lichtenstein, who produced a series of pictures representing the cathedral's front. Mae Babitz, known for illustrations of the Watts Towers and Victorian era buildings in Los Angeles, illustrated the Cathedral in the 1960s. Those works are held UCLA library Special Collections.

• La Cathédrale de Rouen by Claude Monet in 1893

• Camille Pissarro: Rue de l’Épicerie, Rouen, in 1898

In literature, Gustave Flaubert was inspired by the stained glass windows of St. Julian and the bas-relief of Salome, and based two of his Three Tales on them. Joris-Karl Huysmans wrote La Cathédrale about the cathedral, a novel based on an intensive examination of the building. Willa Cather sets a key scene in the development of the protagonist Claude Wheeler of One of Ours in the cathedral.