(source for the following text: http://www.theartwolf.com/monet_cathedral.htm )
"The representation of a same pictorial object at different moments with the aim of observing the changes caused by the natural light was not new for Monet, who between 1890 and 1891 had already created a series of 15 canvases representing a group of haystacks in the outskirts of Giverny. These haystacks had been painted under the summer sun, in the sunrise and in the sunset; at the end of the summer, in the heart of the winter, or in the early spring. The paintings are the result of Monet's interest for the dynamic nature than for any pictorial or scientist theory (Monet himself declared that "I have always hated those awful theories"). The series was praised by the critics, being also a great commercial success. Wassily Kandinsky had the opportunity of seeing one of these haystacks in an exhibition in Moscow in 1895, and he was impressed to the point of suggesting them as the first abstract painting in the history of Art: "And suddenly, for the first time, I saw a picture. I read in the catalogue that it was a haystack, but I could not recognize it (…) I realized that there the object of the picture was missed (…) What I had perfectly present was the unsuspected -and until then hidden- power of the palette…"
But with the Cathedral series Monet went even beyond: here the aim is not to represent a tangible model -as it happened in the haystacks paintings- under different luminances and climatic conditions. In the Rouen Cathedral series, the authentic protagonist is not the architectonic model, in a certain sense "despised" by Monet, who used an extremely nearby point of view, in such way that the architecture, due to the almost complete absence of perspective, loses its grandeur and it is even sectioned in the towers and pinnacles. So the building is here not more than a background, an "excuse", to show the authentic protagonist of the composition: the power of the painting to represent the dynamic quality of the light and the atmosphere, capable of giving life to something as stony and inanimate as the imposing facade of the Gothic Cathedral. That what Kandinsky was able to decipher in the haystacks is here more than evident.
Of course, Monet was obviously unable to represent in a complete canvas the fleetingness of a single moment, so he usually worked simultaneously in several canvases, focusing on a particular one whenever the conditions of light and atmosphere were the appropriates. Let's imagine the situation: Claude Monet installed next to the window of a second floor in front of the Cathedral, working frenetically with tens of canvases, at the mercy of that a fleeting cloud, an unexpected sun ray or an early morning fog forced him to look for a picture in which the new atmospheric conditions could be reflected. Of course, such task had to be exasperating, and the painter was on the verge of giving up the series. But Monet was not a man who easily surrender: " More than ever I detest the things in which I have success at the first attempt ", he had wrote while working on the haystacks series. Monet was even forced to finish several canvases of the Cathedral in his own workshop, entrusting the success of the series to his wonderful visual memory. But two years later, the mission was fulfilled, and Monet had already finished thirty views of the Cathedral. Thus, and for the first time in the history of painting, an artist had managed to represent the fourth dimension, the time, a profit vindicated by numerous pictorial vanguards several decades later
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