The Portal of Rouen Cathedral in Morning Light by Claude Monet at The Getty

For this assignment, I went to the Getty. As much as I wanted to go to the new David Geffen Galleries, or the Broad Museum, even the Hammer, the promise of the Getty’s venerable collection stole my wandering eye. The Center is perched over the languorous hills of the fancy part of LA, it sits tall and lofty and bone-white. There’s a gorgeous garden there. The day I happened to go there just happened to be a grey miserable one. 

The painting caught my attention because of how haunting it is. I never thought Monet (maudlin and mawkish), the painter I thought forever committed to stunning portrayals of flowers and the French countryside, and soft light dappled over the curves of inky midnight water; his brushstrokes are points in colour. They stick up from the canvas, as if reflecting pastiche. They are a collage of colours in the image of an object, the object being the scene. It is a technique that feels analogous to pointillism. The fact that there is dimensionality to the brush strokes somehow makes it an artifact; a vestige of time at least. It speaks to history. I feel this relates to Berger. 

The architectural presence of the cathedral as captured by Monet is haunting and larger than life. When standing before the canvas, the sheer scale of the work transforms it from a mere depiction into a looming figure, an omen that stands over the viewer with a sense of profound weight. This specific shading creates a chiaroscuro effect reminiscent of a candlelit cemetery, where the interplay of light and shadow serves to deepen the mystery of the gothic structure.

The brushstrokes possess a dimensionality that makes the painting feel like an artifact rather than a flat image. There is a tactile quality to the oil on canvas that renders it a vestige of time, a physical remaining piece of a moment long passed. By employing a technique that mirrors pointillism, Monet builds a surface that appears to vibrate with energy. The central black portal of the cathedral acts as a focal point, drawing the viewer into its depths. This compositional choice is evocative of the immersive quality found in Seker Ahmet’s Woodcutter in the Forest, where the viewer is pulled into a dark, wooded expanse.

The painting guides the viewer's gaze upward toward light and sky, providing a contrast to the bleak architecture and sharp, gothic symmetries below. This ascent of the eye mirrors the way museums act as a well of conclusions. Within the gallery, every curated artifact allows for a final gathering of thought, where the history of a building and the history of an artist's vision finally meet. These paintings are historical insight because they preserve the exact quality of light from a morning that passed over a century ago, turning a stone facade into a record of human perception.

John Berger argued that art is a record of visual experience, and here Monet records the experience of a building becoming light itself. This visual record shows how the aesthetics of a culture reflect what it values; the Gothic obsession with height and light reveals a society reaching for the divine through stone. The cathedral reflects a sense of grotesqueness and changelessness as Ruskin identified in his Gothic characteristics, a permanent fixture that has weathered the passage of centuries.

In this context, Ruskin’s work on the Gothic as a series of styles highlights that shattered majesty is better than smooth minuteness. The rough, encrusted surface of Monet’s paint mirrors the weathered, uneven stone of the Rouen facade. It is this shattered majesty, rather than a clean or perfect finish, that gives the painting its power. By avoiding smooth minuteness, Monet captures the true spirit of the Gothic—an architecture that values the soul of the work over the perfection of the detail. Standing in the museum, we find a well of conclusions where this shattered majesty serves as a permanent record of how we once chose to see the world.

That is why it surprised me to see this beautiful, haunting painting hanging in the middle of the Getty, besides cute port cities and bays and forests and rivieras and lily gardens. The cathedral bellows in colour, in its dark, underworldly, sepulchral shades of blue and grey; standing there, it occurred to me as a morass that stretches into spikes, defines itself into sharp, gothic symmetries, and as the austere length of the painting guides our view up we see light and sky, a background, another layer of dimensionality, a break from the bleak architecture below; the top and bottom contrast; the shading overall feels like chiaroscuro in a candlelit cemetery colour palate.