Rouen Cathedral West Facade
— — the face the light keeps repainting.
Not only on a wall.
“The west front of Notre-Dame de Rouen. Three Gothic portals beneath two mismatched towers, the older Tour Saint-Romain on the north side, the late-Gothic Tour de Beurre on the south, paid for by indulgences sold to townspeople who wanted to keep butter in their Lenten kitchens. Monet rented rooms across the Place de la Cathédrale in the 1890s and painted the facade more than thirty times, watching the same stone turn pearl, then gold, then mauve as the morning moved. The square out front is still the place to sit with it. The light keeps doing what it did for him.
Rouen Cathedral West Facade, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Notre-Dame de Rouen rises on the right bank of the Seine in Rouen, the historic capital of Normandy, about 135 km north-west of Paris and roughly 90 minutes from Gare Saint-Lazare by direct train. Construction of the present Gothic cathedral began around 1145 on the site of earlier churches, and the building was substantially complete by the mid-13th century. The west facade frames the Place de la Cathédrale; its three portals open to the nave, with the asymmetric Tour Saint-Romain (late 12th century) on the north and the Flamboyant-Gothic Tour de Beurre (completed 1506) on the south. The cast-iron central spire, finished in 1876, reaches 151 m and briefly made Rouen Cathedral the tallest building in the world.
The west facade is one of the most painted faces in Impressionist art. Between 1892 and 1894 Claude Monet rented rooms across the Place de la Cathédrale and produced more than thirty canvases of this single elevation, working through different hours and weathers to record how the carved limestone shifted from dawn pearl to noon gold to late-afternoon mauve. Twenty of the canvases were shown at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in May 1895; the series sits today in collections from the Musée d'Orsay to the National Gallery in Washington and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen a few blocks north. The facade still does for visitors what it did for Monet: the low morning sun catches it from the east-south-east and pulls colour out of the stone.
The facade was carved from local limestone over the course of three centuries. The Tour Saint-Romain on the north dates to the late 12th century in early Gothic style. The Tour de Beurre on the south, taller and more ornate, was completed in 1506 in the Flamboyant Gothic manner and got its name from the indulgences sold to wealthy Rouennais who paid for the right to consume butter during Lent. Allied bombing in April 1944 struck the cathedral and gutted parts of the nave; the west facade survived but with significant damage, and the restoration of its masonry continued into the 21st century. The carved limestone still browns and pales with the weather, which is part of why Monet chose it.