Why Did Claude Monet Paint the Same Scenes Over and Over Again? The Impressionist Artist Was Obsessed With Capturing the Fleeting Nature of Time

An upcoming exhibition at Tate Modern will feature more than 60 artworks created by Monet between the 1870s and 1920s. These pieces reveal how he documented changing light and weather conditions

Ellen Wexler | Writer and Special Projects Editor

September 24, 2026 11:01 a.m.

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In the winter of 1892, Claude Monet started painting Rouen Cathedral in France. The artist had secured an apartment across from the towering church for this express purpose. “I’m hard at work,” he wrote to Alice Hoschedé, his longtime partner. “I’m taking great pains and think only of my Cathedrals.”

In Monet’s view, many versions of Rouen Cathedral flitted in and out of existence: in the morning fog, in the early afternoon, in the late afternoon, in cloudy weather. Depending on the season and the time of day, the building’s facade might be gold, pink, purple or gray. “Everything changes,” the artist wrote, “even stone.” His task was to capture the ephemeral elements that produced those changes.

The painter returned to Rouen the following winter, eager to continue the project. “This cursed cathedral is hard to do!” he wrote to Hoschedé. “Since I’ve been here, a week tomorrow, I’ve worked every day on the same two paintings and can’t get what I want; well, it will come in the end, with a hard struggle.” By the end of his stay, Monet had painted the cathedral more than 30 times.

Now, some of those canvases are going on view at Tate Modern in London. “Monet: Painting Time” is the museum’s first exhibition dedicated solely to the Impressionist painter, and it’s billed as the United Kingdom’s largest display of his art in nearly a decade. The show opens in February 2027, just a few months after the 100th anniversary of Monet’s death.

Monet created “a new style of painting: capturing fleeting moments amid the accelerating pace of modern life,” the museum says in a statement. “The exhibition will focus on his exploration of the passing of time as one of the defining and most profoundly beautiful achievements of modern painting.”

“Monet: Painting Time” will spotlight more than 60 artworks created between the 1870s and 1920s—a period that “coincided with a dramatic shift in society’s perception of time,” per the museum. As train travel grew more popular in the mid-19th century, a need for standardized time zones arose. Monet explored this theme in paintings including Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare (1877).

But the artist was particularly interested in documenting how time altered individual scenes, such as the facade of Rouen Cathedral. The exhibition will display several series of this kind, including Monet’s Grainstacks paintings (1890-91), which feature different views of the farmland outside his house in Giverny.

“For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment,” Monet once said. “But the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life—the air and the light, which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.”

Museumgoers will also see works from Monet’s Mornings on the Seine series (1896-97). For two summers, the artist woke in the early morning hours and walked to the river. He painted these canvases from a small boat, positioning himself at the center of his scenes.

One highlight of the exhibition is The Seine at Port-Villez (1894), another view of the river painted a few years earlier. Conservators have been working diligently to remove a protective varnish that had yellowed over the years. Monet disliked varnishes, which can distort a painting’s colors and textures, though his dealers frequently used them anyway. The newly restored painting will debut at the upcoming exhibition.

“By removing the varnish, we were able to uncover the artist’s sense of luminosity, which has not been seen in decades,” Genevieve Barton, an assistant curator of international art at Tate Modern, said at a press briefing, per the Art Newspaper’s Gareth Harris.

Removing varnish is a painstaking process—particularly for paintings with textured surface layers, like Monet’s. Nearly a decade ago, experts at Harvard Art Museums removed varnish from the artist’s House of the Customs Officer, Varengeville (1882), which was “quite challenging,” conservator Andrea von Hedenström said in a 2017 video. “Sometimes the varnish was really hidden in valleys of the paint.” She used a fine brush to carefully remove the coating under a microscope.

Officials at Tate Modern are considering removing varnish from other paintings in the museum’s collections. “It is an enormous undertaking, and we would take in the view of the artist who painted it,” Juliet Bingham, the exhibition’s lead curator, tells the London Times’ David Sanderson.

“Monet: Painting Time” ends with canvases from the artist’s best-known series, Water Lilies. In the final decades of his life, Monet created nearly 300 paintings of the pond at his Giverny home, which he carefully landscaped over many years.

“He dug the pond and altered its contours like a drawing; he diverted rivers, planted trees, sketched out curving paths, strewed lilies across the water like flecks of the brush,” Jackie Wullschläger, author of Monet: The Restless Vision, wrote for Smithsonian magazine in 2024. The flowers in his paintings “evoke a dreamy contentment,” she added, “as if the world is in slow motion, or time is stilled altogether.”

“Monet: Painting Time” will be on view at Tate Modern in London from February 25 to June 27, 2027.

Ellen Wexler is a staff writer and special projects editor, digital, for Smithsonian magazine.