Repetition in art is the use of the same image, shape or gesture more than once, either inside a single work or across a series. It is what makes pattern and rhythm possible, and it shows best in Claude Monet's paintings of the west façade of Rouen Cathedral, one building painted 28 times from 1892.
Each canvas shows the same stone façade. In one it is bleached by sunlight, in another it is almost lost in fog, and seen side by side the paintings stop being views of a building and become a record of how much a single thing can change without moving.
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Monet is often pictured standing in front of the cathedral, painting whatever the light did that hour. He did not work that way. In 1892 he painted from a studio in a shop on the cathedral square. The next year the shop was closed to him, because of the inconvenience he had apparently caused the shopkeeper and his customers.
So he moved to an apartment above a novelty store, and from there he shuttled between canvases as the light changed, sometimes among more than a dozen in a single day. Then he took them home to Giverny and finished them in his studio, strengthening the light, enriching the shadows and reworking the surfaces. The hour each painting seems to record was put in, in part, far from the cathedral.
The series that looks like a string of honest observations was built, and Monet complained about it as he went. "Good God, this confounded cathedral is tough to do!" he wrote to his wife Alice in 1893. Painters had been repeating images for centuries before him, though, and the oldest cases are stranger.
Why did France never buy Monet's cathedrals as a set?
The state was asked to, and it did not…
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