12:00
Midday
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Scenes in this gallery
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Claude Monet painted the same haystack, the same cathedral, the same stretch of river dozens of times. Not because he ran out of subjects, but because the subject was never really the haystack. It was the light. He called this l’enveloppe: the enveloping veil of atmosphere and colour that settles over a scene and changes it completely from one hour to the next. The same wall is cool and violet at dawn, blazing gold at noon, and deep blue by dusk. Paint it once and you capture a thing. Paint it through the day and you capture the light itself moving across it.
Each scene here is painted as a Monet would, then relit across the day: dawn, midday, dusk, and night. Drag the hour, or press play, and watch the brushstrokes lay themselves down again, repainting the same place in the light of a different moment.