TitleFrom Grosse Horloge, Rouen
Artist
Kenyon Cox
(American, 1856 - 1919)
Date1878
MediumOil on composition board
DimensionsUnframed: 13 5/8 × 9 1/2 in.
Storage: 14 1/4 × 11 1/4 × 1 3/8 in.
SignedSigned lower right: "from Grosse Horloge Rouen 30 June 1878"; on verso: "Kenyon Cox"
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY, Gift of Allyn Cox, Caroline Cox Lansing, and Leonard Cox, 1959
Object number1616.5-P
Label TextIn June 1878 Cox returned to Rouen, a city whose architecture had greatly impressed him upon his arrival in France the previous year. On the last day of the month, France celebrated its first major fête nationale since the Commune. That evening, Cox wrote home:[block quote:]
I set out after breakfast to make my mornings sketch and sat down at nine under the great "horloge" [clock] to sketch my favorite tower of the cathedral. The streets were already dressed out with flags, and by the time I had worked half an hour there was such a crowd around me some constantly coming as others went away that it was almost impossible to keep a clear path in front. Of course I was obliged to work at lightning speed but I was in high good humor with myself and the world, and in about an hour and a half made the best thing I have yet done. Of course it is extremely unfinished, almost unintelligible in parts, but there is the cathedral tower standing up gray against the white windy sky, and the varied tones of the crowding gables (and a couple of tricolored flags) set in broadly. I am really pleased with the sketch, much more than I have been with any thing I have done in a long time.
[end of block quote]
Cox's sketch of a street perspective with French flags hanging on either side has an interesting, coincidental historical significance, for the French masters Edouard Manet and Claude Monet painted similar scenes in Paris that very day. Manet's two versions of The Rue Mosnier, Decked with Flags (1878, both private collections) and Monet's two views of the rue St-Denis and the rue Montorgueil, Paris (1878, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, and Musée d'Orsay, Paris, respectively) exhibit contrasting reactions to the republican celebration that so excited the French populace. Cox's quick, straightforward sketch, neither exultant nor pessimistic, attests to a certain lack of engagement with the political and social implications of the event, which seem to have concerned the older French artists.
